‘Submergence’ Trailer: Alicia Vikander & James McAvoy Fall In Love

It has been a while since Wim Wenders (“Wings Of Desire,” “Paris, Texas“) has a truly great narrative film, and unfortunately, the wait continues. The director’s latest, “Submergence,” is another disappointment, a nearly howlingly bad romantic drama that threads together a creaky and overwrought romantic tragedy.

Based on the book by J.M. Ledgard, with a script by Erin Dignam (who is gaining the wrong reputation after having also penned Sean Penn’s critical disaster “The Last Face”), the film stars James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander, and follows a British secret agent and a bio-mathematician who fall madly in love after meeting at a very fancy, exclusive resort. However, their respective jobs take them away from each other, possibly forever. Here’s the official synopsis:

James (James McAvoy) is a British agent under the cover of a water engineer, while Danny (Alicia Vikander) is a bio-mathematician working on a deep-sea diving project to explore the origin of life on our planet. On a chance encounter in a remote resort in Normandy where they both prepare for their respective missions, they fall rapidly, and unexpectedly, into each other’s arms and a deliriously wild love affair develops, even though their jobs are destined to separate them. Danny sets off on a perilous quest to dive to the bottom of the ocean. James’s assignment takes him to Somalia, where he is sucked into a geopolitical vortex that puts him in grave danger. Both characters are subject to different kinds of isolation as they pine for each other; their determination to reconnect becomes as much an existential journey as a love story.

“Submergence” hits theaters and VOD in the U.S. on April 13th. [Cine Maldito]