Lives: Film

When you’re reckoning with what’s happened to you, this lack of visibility only adds to your understanding that the sheer length of time it took you to adjust, will only ever be understood by other people as a small footnote to your reality. In 13 Lives, despite being the titular characters of the film, the Thai boys struggle to emerge as anything larger than a baker’s dozen smiling heads. We get glimpses of their personalities, and the film brushes on their young instructor’s use of meditation to keep the boys calm during their sustained period underground, but ultimately, these kids whose experience the film attempts to detail, are always presented as cut-off objects.

Like when the news played out in real time, we imagine their feelings, but the film doesn’t detail their experience with any actual bite. The emotional depth of what happened is always fleshed out by proxy: through the cynicism of the divers and the government, the lurid news interest, or the sheer relief of the parents come the kids’ safe return. On a surface level, the film struggles to push past a traditional orientalist view - the Western divers are a prerequisite to saving the helpless Thai people. But on a more abstract level, the camera’s avoidant gaze ncompasses a general societal refusal to look the dismay of trauma in the face, and instead it clings to a sensationalist narrative rooted in having a false endpoint.

All this being said, the film does manage to believably encompass the claustrophobia of the situation. We know the story (everything will work out in the end), and yet as the viewers, we get a palpable sense that the outcome could have very easily been markedly different.

While it’s true that the film doesn’t engage with the boys’ experience much directly, Ron Howard’s use of tight shots and extended sequences of cramped struggles underwater turn the film into a near-4Dviewing experience. The unchanging location has the potential to become repetitive, but Howard doesn’t allow the tension to let up, and the dark walls of the cave become an endless hellscape, under which, as a viewer, you can’t quite let yourself breathe.

In an indirect sense, this depiction fleshes out the reality of trauma in a fresh way. It touches on what it means to live your day in the shadow of unprocessed horror, and to carry grief around with you everywhere you go. It’s easy with hindsight to dismiss what happened to the Thai boys as a blip of a couple of weeks, but being able to actually imagine how those three hundred and thirty six hours actually unfolded without the benefit of foresight, requires a degree of empathy that words will always struggle to communicate. The airless atmosphere of the film compensates where language fails, capturing the exact panicked feeling of not being able to cope with anymore, but carrying on nonetheless.

The unbelievable fact that every kid made it out of the cave alive against all expectations, means that there will always be room for feel-good stories that fill us with hope, and remind us of the durability of the human spirit. But it’s worth sparing a thought for the real lives that exist behind the ten seconds of rolling credits at the end of the film. While you might not get your clear-cut Hollywood ending, there will come a day when you wake up, and feel okay again.