The Abyss

Imagine your entire hometown is being packed up into boxes and moved two miles down the road because the ground beneath your feet has become a structural suggestion rather than a geological fact. This isn't the setup for a high-concept sci-fi flick; it’s the lived reality of Kiruna, Sweden, where the world’s largest underground iron ore mine is slowly swallowing the city above it. Richard Holm’s The Abyss (2023) takes this inherently terrifying premise and attempts to turn it into a high-stakes disaster thriller, though I spent a good portion of the runtime wondering if the real-life logistics of moving an entire city’s plumbing wouldn't have been just as harrowing.

I watched this on a rainy Tuesday while trying to assemble a particularly stubborn IKEA shoe rack, and every time a character on screen ignored a seismic warning, I took out my frustration on a dowel rod. There’s something uniquely infuriating about disaster movie protagonists who see a crack the size of a tectonic plate and decide, "Yeah, it’s probably fine for another twenty minutes."

The Town That’s Literally Packing Its Bags

The film centers on Frigga, played by the consistently excellent Tuva Novotny (who you might recognize from the mind-bending Annihilation or the gripping A War). Frigga is the head of security for the Kiirunavaara mine, a job that essentially makes her the person responsible for telling everyone when the sky—or in this case, the floor—is falling. She’s caught in the middle of a domestic tug-of-war that feels almost as volatile as the shifting earth: she’s trying to finalize a divorce from her hot-headed husband Tage (Peter Franzén, the terrifying King Harald from Vikings) while her new boyfriend Dabir (Kardo Razzazi) has just arrived from Uppsala to surprise her.

This is where The Abyss differentiates itself from its bombastic Hollywood cousins like San Andreas. Instead of Dwayne Johnson jumping a helicopter into a tsunami, we get a very Swedish sort of tension. It’s grounded, damp, and filled with people wearing sensible wool sweaters while arguing about custody schedules. The first act does a fantastic job of establishing the "Not if, but when" tagline. We see the literal cracks in the foundation of the town, and the cinematography by Anssi Leino captures the claustrophobia of the mine and the stark, freezing beauty of the Swedish North with chilling clarity.

Domestic Drama in a Hard Hat

When the big collapse finally happens—and boy, does it happen—the film shifts gears into a race against time. Frigga’s daughter, Mika (Felicia Truedsson), goes missing just as the town begins to crater, forcing the awkward trio of the wife, the ex, and the new guy to head into the belly of the beast. It’s essentially a marriage counseling session conducted while falling down a sinkhole.

The action choreography in these sequences is surprisingly effective. There’s a specific scene involving a school area that genuinely rattled me; it taps into that primal fear that the very ground we rely on is a lie. Richard Holm manages to make the mine feel like a living, breathing antagonist, groaning and shifting with a sound design that makes your own floorboards feel suspicious. However, the film does fall into that classic streaming-era trap where the CGI occasionally looks like it was rendered on a toaster during a power outage. When the scale is small and practical, it’s terrifying; when the entire town starts collapsing like a house of cards, the digital seams start to show.

When the Earth Doesn't Just Move, It Swallows

What struck me most about The Abyss is how it fits into our current "streaming disaster" landscape. We’re seeing a lot of these regional thrillers—think Norway’s The Wave or The Quake—that take localized fears and give them a cinematic budget. It’s a refreshing break from the "the whole world is ending" trope. Here, the world isn't ending; just your world is. That specificity makes the stakes feel much more personal.

That said, the script by Richard Holm and Robin Sherlock Holm leans a bit too heavily on the "troubled teen" trope with Mika. Her rebellion feels like a plot device to get the adults into dangerous locations rather than a fully realized character arc. There were moments where I found myself rooting for the sinkhole just to end the teenage angst. The seismic sensors in this movie have the predictive power of a magic eight ball that’s been dropped down a flight of stairs, yet everyone acts surprised when the mountain starts eating people.

Despite the clichés, Tuva Novotny carries the emotional weight of the film effortlessly. She makes you believe in the impossible stress of her situation, and her chemistry with Kardo Razzazi provides a much-needed heartbeat amidst the falling debris. It’s a solid, meat-and-potatoes thriller that knows exactly what it is. It’s not trying to reinvent the genre; it’s just trying to give you a reason to check your basement for cracks.

The Abyss is a perfectly capable thriller that benefits immensely from its unique, real-world setting. While it doesn't quite escape the shadow of better disaster films, it offers enough "crunchy" tension and solid acting to justify a watch on a quiet night. Just don’t expect it to change your life—unless you happen to live in a town built on top of an iron mine. In that case, you might want to start packing your boxes before the credits roll.

***

If you’ve got 104 minutes and a mild case of geological anxiety, you could do a lot worse. It’s the kind of film that makes you appreciate the boring, stable ground of your suburban driveway. Just keep your expectations as level as the horizon, and you’ll have a perfectly good time watching everything else fall apart.