Annette Bening in a true test of endurance

Swimming the 100 miles from Cuba to Florida is hardly a small feat, let alone for a 64-year-old woman, on her fifth try, after previous attempts defeated by inept navigation, shark terrors, gruesome jellyfish assaults, stamina lapses and tropical storms. The American endurance swimmer Diana Nyad – her very name the Greek word for a water nymph, as her father would often remind her – simply would not let it go.

She tried in 1978, as archive footage in Nyad shows, gave up swimming for 30 years, then suddenly became obsessed with trying again, to log her name in the history books and gain a feeling of life accomplishment for which she’d found no other substitute. 

Annette Bening seizes on the role with a single-mindedness that’s borderline perverse. Without the irony or empathetic twinkle that gives her best performances such a glow, we’re confronted here with Force 10 frosty disdain, and there’s a serious danger of sacrificing an audience’s ability to care.

Luckily, Nyad wasn’t alone in this endeavour. Side-by-side with her, forking out nutrients on the boat that accompanied her on each attempted crossing, was her coach, childhood friend, ex-lover and de facto life partner Bonnie (Jodie Foster), whose default sunny disposition and bursts of exasperation already give Foster more of a palette to daub with. She’s loose, likeable and rather gallant throughout, and a pleasure to watch. Rhys Ifans, as their grizzled navigation whiz, chips in what charm he can.

The directors are Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, best-known for their documentaries The Rescue (about the 2018 Thai cave-flooding crisis) and the Oscar-winning Free Solo, about Alex Honnold’s sweaty-palmed assaults on the peak of El Capitan.