Director – Sophie Dupuis – 2020 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 97m
**
A tale of friendship, loss and regret plays out against the working lives of miners – out in cinemas and on Virtual Cinemas and VoD from Friday, August 20th
A vast, modern, industrial mine in the French-speaking part of Canada. An explosion is heard, so a rescue team is put together to go and extract the trapped workers. Max, full name Maxime (Joakim Robillard) is one of the youngest team members and has a disagreement with the leader Catherine (Catherine Trudeau). They have two men on stretchers and need to get them out to safety. Protocol insists they should not go and rescue anyone else as it would endanger not only the two they are ready to take to safety but also the rescue crew members.
However, the headstrong Max wants to go down and save the remaining trapped miners. He seems incapable of following either protocol or orders.
We flash back two months and get to know Max’s life. He and his partner Andrée-Anne (Lauren Hartley) have for some time been trying to start a family using in vitro fertilisation, but when she miscarries, she decides she can’t go on with the process any more. With the couple’s hopes and preparations dashed, Max asks one of his work colleagues about how adoption worked for him and his family.
Max divides his time between Andrée-Anne and Julien (Théodore Pellerin), an old friend with whom he was in a car crash for which Max was responsible having had too much to drink. Julien has suffered brain damage and lost the full use of one leg and one arm. He can no longer work shifts in the mine and has been unable to find work. His father Mario (James Hyndman) still works at the mine, but is cold towards his fellow workers especially Max.
When the mine disaster happens, and looks like it has been caused by Mario, Max’s immediate superiors refuse to tell him the names of the trapped fearing that this would affect his ability to rescue them…
A lot of time is spent watching the mineworkers go about their job squandering the potential to show, in passing, the workings of the place. Writer-director Dupuis, however, doesn’t seem interested in this beyond its basic use as a setting, which means that, for example, it’s not very clear exactly what causes the tragedy. Nor, when we see miners executing specific tasks on site, is it clear what they’re doing. You almost wonder why she bothered with the mine setting at all.
That leaves us with the interpersonal relationships, where the piece fares rather better. Many scenes of miners going in to or coming out of shifts make much use of locker room, canteen or crowded lift shaft banter. Outside of the workplace, a scene with Max and Andrée-Anne decorating their imminent child’s bedroom lands extra poignancy to his discovery that she thinks the blockage in the toilet pipe is their baby.
Max loses it when he fails to get Julien a job at a fast food restaurant, but is more relaxed taking his friend on a boat with two workmates, putting a life jacket on Julien so he can swim in the lake with the others. The scenes with Max and Mario culminate in a huge row where Mario turns up outside Max’s house drunk and angry, and has to be driven home.
It’s not for lack of trying on the part of the cast, but to me the whole thing felt unfocused and I didn’t particularly care about the characters – or for that matter the mining backdrop – one way or the other. And I should, because this ought to be compelling material. All the ingredients are here, they just aren’t marshalled anything like as well as they might be.
Underground is out out in cinemas and on Virtual Cinemas and VoD in the UK on Friday, August 20th.
Trailer: