review

Freediver: Movie review

4/7 stars - Fascinating world, but I didn't feel it

Ryan Schuetzler

21 May 2025 • 2 min read

I recently watched the movie Freediver, about Alexey Molchanov's attempt to break the 5 major records in freediving in a single year. The records are:

Variable weight: Where the diver rides down on a weighted sled, then swims back up
Monofin: Where the diver wears a dolphin-like fin on their feet to swim both down and up.
Bi-fin: Where the diver uses two traditional fins to swim both down and up.
Free immersion: Where the diver climbs down on a line, then can climb back up the line.
N0 fin: Where the diver swims down with no fins, then swims back up.

The world of freediving is fascinating to me. I love the idea of pushing your body to its limits, and I really love the idea of being in the ocean with very little equipment, swimming around and enjoying being down with fish and other aquatic life without the encumbrance of scuba equipment. When I'm snorkeling, I love to dive down and swim around (of course without anything close to the lung capacity of competitive freedivers).

The beginning of this movie was fascinating to me. Alexey is truly an incredible athlete, and has dedicated his life to a sport that is not exactly going to get him a lot of accolades outside of that community.

In the end, though, I was left wanting more. I want to understand what goes into training for such a feat, or even the pre-dive preparation a diver must go through. We saw snippets of Alexey sucking in bits of air before diving down, but no explanation of what it was, or why.

💡

This might have been done for legal liability reasons. Perhaps the filmmakers didn't want to get sued when kids tried their own freediving and end up getting hurt because they're not properly prepared. But it was still a bummer not to see and understand more of the process.

I also think the editing during the record attempts, besides maybe the first one, was cutting too much to give the full impression of the feat. I wanted to see a full attempt to get the complete picture of just how long it takes to go down and back up. I wanted to watch as the diver switches from swimming down to coasting as the lungs shrink with the pressure and buoyancy allows them to sink to conserve energy. I feel like one of the record attempts was cut so much, and interspersed with other side story elements, that I didn't realize the attempt was even happening until the white card was given.

Overall, I felt too much time was spent talking about Alexey's mother, Natalia, and her role, rather than on the actual freediving.

4/7 stars.