Details

Release year: 2018

Storyline

The 2000 K-141 Kursk submarine disaster is followed by governmental negligence. As the sailors fight for survival, their families desperately battle political obstacles and impossible odds to save them.

Top credits

Directors

Thomas Vinterberg

Writers

Cast

Matthias Schoenaerts — Mikhail Averin
Léa Seydoux — Tanya Averina
Peter Simonischek — Admiral Vyacheslav Grudzinsky
August Diehl — Anton Markov

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Did you know

• The film shows Admiral Petrenko (Max von Sydow) as heading the public information panel: in reality it was actually headed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

• This is one of Michael Nyqvist's final films. He died of lung cancer in June 2017, a month before shooting was finished. However, according to The Guardian, Nyqvist completed his scenes.

• Vladimir Putin's character was cut from the film before an actor was cast for the role. Putin, who was just three months into the job as Russian president when the tragedy occurred in 2000, was slated to appear as a supporting character in at least five scenes in the film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, EuropaCorp's president, Luc Besson, wanted to shift the story's focus to the rescue mission rather than the politics behind the disaster. One theory is that nobody at EuropaCorp wanted to be hacked. "Remember The Interview (2014)?" a source said, referring to the Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen-directed comedy that angered Kim Jong-un and is believed to have sparked the infamous Sony hack in 2014. Ironically, the Russian leader is sympathetically portrayed in the original Kursk script, which highlighted why he took the tragedy personally (Putin's father was a submariner).