The Cave

While Word Cup football fever took hold of the entire nation in the summer of 2018, youth football team The Wild Boars became trapped, along with their coach, in the Tham Luang Cave Chang Rai province. News of the boy’s plight attracted worldwide media attention as cave diving experts flew in to Thailand to plan the rescue of the teenagers and their mentor from deep inside the flooded network.

The story had it all. The drama of a ticking clock - the next rain downfall expected to destroy the rescue operation, bureaucratic red-tape hindering potential rescuers armed with industrial pumps, the kindness of local people pitching together for a common good. A media circus brooding like a wake of vultures as the events tragically unfolded.

Human tragedy often invokes the kind of innate human goodwill that the mainstream media will have us believe doesn’t exist. Yet, in this case the media had it all handed to them in a silver-plated betel-nut spittoon. Adventure, quest, resolution.

And yes, a Happy Ending. The Cave has a hands on Thai-style Happy Ending. Against all odds the boys and their coach are safely evacuated from cavernous depths (while sedated with ketamine) by the team of international experts and diving crew. After two weeks of meditation, acute hunger and outstanding boredom a blinding ray of light and hope flickers strapped to a diver’s hardhat. The boys are rescued one by one in one of the most complex rescue events in modern history.

Predictably the rush to dramatize the rescue event was almost as feverish as the rescue event itself. Tom Waller’s The Cave film was released in Thai theaters this week. The film, based on a script written chiefly by Don Linder, boasts a huge ensemble cast documenting the cave rescue operation with enough authenticity to put this film in a category of docu-drama or event reconstruction (a genre I just invented) rather than straight out narrative film. This is completely fine if one is hoping to learn how the rescue operation was, against all odds, accomplished. 

Followers of the rule of thumb that art should surprise us, confound expectations, challenge belief structures, will no doubt concede that The Cave had no such lofty aspirations to exploit the factual events in exchange for entertainment. The Cave tells a story from beginning to end in the most honest and straight-forward film-making fashion possible. It is linear, logical, and edited tightly to fit our ever-decreasing attention spans. Employing local talent The Cave keeps Thailand films relevant and showcases a range of talents deployed and ready for action for future productions. 

The Cave is the first feature length adaptation of the rescue event and possibly the final word. There is no central protagonist in this fly-on-the-wall docu-drama affair although Belgian diver Jim Warney comes close to that role. Cinematography by Wade Muller is slick and a film score by Oliver Lliboutry builds tension. A handful of extras are a little shaky on delivering  but overall the film is grand and  accomplished. The narrative is informative, and sometimes heart-warming. Essentially this first to market film of  the cave rescue is a  reconstruction of a wonderful story of human kindness and worth checking out if the escape grabbed your attention. 

The film is out in Thai cinemas now.  

Listen to the audio review of The Cave on This Strange Life podcast HERE.