It’s to Pioneer’s credit that it is able to take something as clinical-sounding as “decompression sickness” and successfully turn it into a tension-ratcheting plot point. In Erik Skjoldbjærg’s early ‘80s-set thriller, the frantic race to the oil reserves at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea leads to tragic consequences for deep sea diver brothers Petter (Aksel Hennie) and Knut (André Eriksen). And having spent the last few years floating from one project to the next—like a plastic bag dancing in the wind—Wes Bentley (recently of The Hunger Games, Interstellar, and The Better Angels) has had a comeback of sorts, vying for the position of the “Oh, hey, it’s that guy!” of 2014. Here, he lands in a supporting role as a shifty American diver on the original team conscripted to carry out a series of test dives to depths never-before-attempted by human subjects.

When an accident at 500 meters below the surface is quietly swept under the rug by authorities, Petter sets out to uncover what really happened, pitting himself against his own government and the encroaching American science team. Skjoldbjærg’s unpretentious take on the paranoia-driven thrillers of the 1970’s doesn’t always make sense—the Americans are cartoonishly evil at times, with only Bentley’s naturally off-kilter blue-eyed intensity tempering some of the broader strokes—but what it gets wrong with the plot, it gets absolutely right with the tone. The extreme physical toll of deep sea diving on the human body is difficult to watch at times. Skjoldbjærg carefully (though usually clumsily) lays out the basic science behind depressurization, via expository scenes with lab rats, lab fish, and human subjects. All of thisleads up to a harrowing climax: torture by hyperbaric chamber. It is pulse-pounding and headache-inducing—but in the very best way.

It is unfortunate that a film so indebted to the themes of a very ‘70s genre doesn’t also adopt the era’s analogue aesthetic. The digital cinematography wrests the feature away from its retro roots, with major sequences marred by shallow depth-of-field. Clearly, Skjoldbjærg means to employ the blurry edges of the frame as a sort of subjective technique: for example the image fades in and out as Petter’s drifts in and out of consciousness as the pressures of the deep affect his fragile flesh. But it’s a device that has been trotted out countless times before, and never reads as an artistic choice so much as a medium specific necessity.

Grade: B-