Matt Erspamer: ‘Nyad’ review — Swimming across uncanny valley

It’s not often I make it through a movie as bad as Nyad. Several times throughout, it felt like an elaborate prank, an incoherent and tonally jarring attempt at a very straightforward genre: the athlete biopic. 

Here is a movie where nearly every cut seems misjudged, where the exact wrong take of almost every scene seems to have been selected. 

Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Nyad seems assembled by an AI that was prompted to create an Oscar-worthy biopic but with only half the ingredients. Nyad has a seemingly impossible feat, she trains to accomplish it, and as she attempts it she overcomes not just societal expectations, but personal demons. 

Her goal? To swim over 100 miles from Cuba to Florida at the age of 60. I was surprised at just how much time Nyad spends in the water. She tries the swim over and over, her heart set on proving everyone wrong. Had the movie simply focused on the physical labors of such an act, it would have been serviceable. But Julia Cox’s script, based on Nyad’s memoir, adds too much dramatic weight to nearly every moment, piling on hallucinations and philosophical musings until it’s unbearable. 

“She still thinks she’s swimmin’,” Nyad’s navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) mutters after she has to be pulled out of the water during one attempt. It’s delivered with the same hilarious gravitas as the father saying “The wrong kid died!” in an intentionally funny biopic parody, 2007’s Walk Hard. 

Though it veers into unintended comedy, Nyad is a contrived, insulting drama that has its main character contend with sharks, jellyfish, and the elements as well as unresolved childhood trauma. It’s edited together as if she’s progressing through a video game, trying over and over to defeat these things as if they are boss battles.

To progress through the jellyfish level, she must find a jellyfish expert online (I’m not kidding). For the sharks and trauma, she’ll need people to jump into the water to protect and motivate her. 

Any glimpses of actual humanity in this film only pop up in relation to The Swim. While the movie has some interest in Nyad’s motivation, it has almost none in what motivates Bonnie. Bening and Foster wrangle glimpses of interiority out of thin air, but the way the story is presented manages to be both generic and vapid. 

It’s not usually interesting to me to write about a movie that I found this inept, but Nyad is bad in ways that shocked me. This is the kind of thing that would simply be boring, forgettable Oscar bait had it been made competently. But because of just how wrong nearly every moment feels, it transforms an inspiring story into a bafflingly inadequate, almost surreal experience.

Matt Erspamer is a writer and movie lover who lives in Seattle.

Any views or opinions expressed in this letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.