Don’t Be Prey evaluation – invigorating story of swimming banker aiming to keep away from being shark meals | Documentary movies

The title of this invigorating documentary about open-water swimming appears at first to be a wry note-to-self relating to one thing opponents primarily don’t have any management over: the potential for turning into shark meals. But, as practised by Australian waterman Mark Sowerby, it seems to a surprisingly deep and empowering maxim about selecting to just accept apprehensions and fears, and never being picked off by one’s internal vulnerabilities.

Sowerby is that oft-spotted species: the funding banker in search of redemption. Adrift among the many 1%, he pivots to long-distance swimming and makes a traumatic crossing of the English Channel in 2015. Then his firm turns into chum for short-sellers. His vanity in tatters, despair swallows him up. Realising he can course of the trauma with intensive pool time, Sowerby decides that finishing the opposite six phases of the “Oceans Seven” – a set of brutal channel crossings across the globe – is the tonic he wants.

With the problem designed to make individuals confront their aquatic “kryptonite” no less than twice, the bodily facet is daunting. Hyper-dynamic drone photographs underline Sowerby’s plankton-like progress. One mordant physician sums up the consequences of progressive hypothermia – enemy no 1 within the Scottish-Irish North Channel (34.5km) and Japan’s Tsugaru Strait (19.5km) – as “everything slowly getting worse – a very miserable situation”. Great whites aren’t even the worst factor about Hawaii’s Moloka’i Channel (42km); that will be the nightmarish-looking cookiecutter sharks that rocket vertically up from the depths to take fist-sized lumps out of flesh.

But greater than these points, marathon swimming is an train in confronting one’s personal thoughts and creating a sure relish for it. Sowerby’s Gethsemane comes throughout a nocturnal crossing of the Catalina Channel (32.3km), the place he confesses to hacking for hours by a soup of self-loathing. Director Jeff Tseng places insightful emphasis on the coach’s position in deciding whether or not this torture ought to proceed or finish; the person on the boat right here, Tim Denyer, describes the duty as supplying empathy, however not sympathy.

With the movie selecting to additionally briefly profile a number of different fellow masochists locally, it doesn’t absolutely contact backside in chronicling Sowerby’s psychological restoration. But maybe these items can’t be absolutely defined, solely skilled; if nothing else, this doughty saga leaves you glad he skilled it on our behalf.