Diving Into the Darkness

Wednesday March 12 @ 1:30 pm

Documentary / Adventure
1 hr 36 min – Not Rated – Released 2024

Diving Into the Darkness is one of the most thrilling biographical documentaries you will see this year. Filmed in locations you’re unlikely to see in any other film — or anywhere on Earth – It follows Jill Heinerth, who travels deep into the planet through cave diving. The film includes jaw-dropping footage that Australian director Nays Baghai and his team recorded by following Heinerth on her expeditions around the globe. The film is a jaw-dropping yet intimate portrait of cave diving icon Jill Heinerth, and the nail-biting challenges and risks she’s faced to go where no man or woman has gone before.

Jill has been involved in the most legendary and demanding cave diving expeditions of all time, from surveying the world’s longest caves in Mexico to discovering giant iceberg caves in Antarctica. Juxtaposed with these hair-raising dives are intimate, candid interviews and animated flashbacks to her younger years that reveal a complex array of motivations for taking on these challenges. Despite losing more than 100 of her friends to these depths, for Jill, each adventure in this dive odyssey is one step closer to becoming the woman she wished she’d met when she was a child.

The film opens with a quote from James Cameron: “More people have been to the moon than to the places Jill Heinerth has explored deep inside our watery planet.” And from early on, the film dispels the popular understanding of cave diving as an extreme sport and establishes it far more in the lineage of exploration and space travel. These people are not adrenalin junkies, but explorers that push on the frontiers of human knowledge to discover the unknown, the beautiful, and the important. It also works as a suspense film. It tells the stories of some of her most dangerous dives and near-death experiences in a slow deliberate way that builds the tension perfectly, relying heavily on Jill’s perfectly pitched narration to convey the danger and wonder of cave diving without resorting to hyperbole.

Two decades later, in the present day, Jill’s ultimate mission morphs into becoming “the woman I wish I had met when I was 10 years old”. She achieves this by using her expeditions and photographs to educate and inspire children and adults around the world. The film ends with Jill visiting one of her idol Cousteau’s favourite locations – the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand. Donning her rebreather and penetrating the alien caverns of the islands, Jill muses how she feels like an earthbound astronaut. Her ultimate message is for people to think about fear, “embrace the darkness, and do something new for yourself and for humanity”. The film is part nature documentary, part biography, part suspense film and always beautiful. You probably won’t come away wanting to dive into the darkness yourself but you will leave with a profound respect for Jill Heinerth and those brave enough to explore the subterranean frontiers.