I knew this Amazon Prime original movie had landed when I was so unapologetically moved by a goddamn Spongebob Squarepants cake. Not that the movie hadn’t jangled my nerves and rattled my brains up to that point, but… wow… someone (Ron Howard) sure knows how to manipulate an audience (in a good way).

Thirteen Lives is the true story of the 2018 rescue of twelve boys and their coach who got trapped in a flooded cave during a surprise monsoon. It mainly follows the (to paraphrase a NASA term) steely-eyed cave diving men as they make repeated dives to reach the boys. But finding them was “easy”, getting them out was the real challenge.

An international team of heroes come together and somehow manage the impossible using skill, know-how, and nerves of steel. It’s about competent well-trained experts doing their job. It’s a rescue story, an adventure, a disaster, and a heart-pounding horror movie all rolled into one 2 1/2 hour ball of anxiety.

The film is full of well-shot, fantastic, and claustrophobic cave diving sequences. About the only thing that made this manageable was knowing they weren’t going to bump into an aquatic cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller during their (ahem) descent. But that assurance doesn’t make the dark interiors, forest of stalactites, and murky water full of currents any less nerve-wracking.

But the movie really starts shredding your nerves once they come up with their crazy plan to get the boys out. It’s a terrifying existential nightmare filmed terrifyingly. The uncertainty if it was even going to work much less how many kids they were going to lose was one thing, just watching the clinical procedures to ready each boy was something else. A mesmerizing bit of existential dread that puts you in both the headspace of the boys and the rescue divers.

This film is a waterlogged, exhausting nightmare and every time a diver’s head pops up out of the water, it was one step closer to relief. I can’t imagine how tired these actors were at the end of each day of shooting, much less the actual divers who performed these heroics.

This is a very, very tense film and I wouldn’t call it exactly a good time on old Amazon Prime, but I will call it effective, dramatic, and harrowing. Well worth a watch (if you have nerves of steel).

Score: 92