Movie review: The Rescue is a nerve-shredding account of humanity at its best

A raging underwater river and young boys trapped in a cave

The Rescue

★★★★☆

In 2018, a young Thai football team — the Wild Boars — and their coach found themselves trapped two kilometres underground by rising waters when a sudden cloudburst flooded the cave system they were exploring. T

he Rescue (PG) is a documentary-style account of the desperate attempts to locate and extract the boys, a process that unfolded over 18 days.

It’s a story that gripped the world’s imagination at the time, and while the viewer will likely know how the story concludes, the scale of the task fairly boggles the mind. 

The Rescue

The simple version is that experienced amateur cave-divers from around the world assembled at the cave mouth, and plunged in to try to find the missing boys; in reality, the operation required vast numbers of engineers, soldiers, and Thai Navy Seals, along with thousands of civilian volunteers, working night and day to prevent the monsoon rains from seeping down through the honeycombed mountain and drowning the boys before help might arrive. 

The conditions inside the pitch-black cave, meanwhile, were absolutely horrific: phrases like ‘raging underwater river’ and ‘white-water caving’ are enough to induce nightmares.

Created from on-site footage, news reports and dramatic reconstructions, The Rescue is a nerve-shredding account of humanity at its best. 

(Disney+).