A film about free diving faces an awkward fact from the start: the sport is mostly a person holding still underwater, and cinema likes to move. No Limit never quite decides which of the two it wants. David M. Rosenthal’s French romantic drama, released on Netflix, follows Roxana Aubrey (Camille Rowe), who drops her studies, leaves Paris and signs up for a free diving course in the south of France. The sea gets its share of screen time, but the film spends its energy on the people Roxana meets there, and most of all on the one who takes hold of her attention.

The story is loosely based on the death of the freediver Audrey Mestre, who died while trying to break a world record, and the film maintains that it is fiction. That gives Rosenthal room to invent. It also means every dive carries a question the audience half knows the answer to. The French title, Sous emprise, points at the relationship rather than the water. Roxana meets Pascal (Sofiane Zermani), and the film ties her fascination with the depths to her dependence on him. Water and Pascal pull her in the same direction, down and away from her old life, and the film keeps asking what that pull costs her.

That pairing is the idea the script handles with most care. Rosenthal does not look away from the darker side of the couple. The sex scenes are frank and fairly graphic, and the film puts the physical side of the affair on screen without much coyness. Whether that adds anything is another matter. Heat is plentiful. What I missed was a clear sense of why Roxana stays, and a toxic love story lives or dies on exactly that. Without it, her choices begin to look like things the plot needs her to do rather than things she would do.

Rowe carries the film. She plays Roxana as someone reckless and fragile in the same breath, and she is convincing as the student who walks away from her old life in Paris. Zermani has the harder job. Pascal is written as charm with a threat underneath, and the part leaves him little room for anything else. Their scenes together are the ones that hold your attention. The rest of the cast is used more thinly. César Domboy plays Tom, Zacharie Chasseriaud is Sacha, Laurent Fernandez is Stephane, Natalie Mitson is Naomi, Muriel Combeau is Juliette and Alexandre Poole is Joseph Archer. They gather around Roxana, but to me they register more as people she passes than as people with their own view of what is happening to her. A friend or a rival with a real opinion about Pascal would have given her choices some resistance to push against.

The film is less sure of itself when it tries to be a sports story and a love story at once. The diving and the quarrels between the lovers sit awkwardly beside each other, and my attention drifted whenever the action left the water for ordinary life on land. The dialogue tends to state what the images have already made clear. The emotional beats arrive on schedule, so a viewer who has seen a handful of relationship dramas will guess a good deal of what follows. The sorrow the story builds toward ought to feel earned, and too often it feels imposed.

Critical opinion on the film is divided. One Rotten Tomatoes verdict calls it a disappointing and boring movie. That is harsh, though the sagging stretches give it some ground. Others read it more generously. Tarshi published a review by ElsaMarie D’Silva titled Descent into Darkness, which takes the film as a story about the tragic death of a young woman diver and the darkness around it. That seems to me a fairer way in than a one-line dismissal, because the strongest thing the film has is Roxana’s slow decline, not the spectacle around it. Viewers should also know that it is a dark, tense drama in French, available with subtitles or dubbing.

Then there is the matter of what the film borrows. Mestre’s story is real, and No Limit leans on its weight while keeping its distance from the facts. Is it right to turn a real death into a romance with a beautiful backdrop? The film never raises the question itself. Rosenthal seems to have decided that calling the story fiction is shield enough. I am not sure it is, and the film makes no attempt to argue the case.

No Limit gives Rowe a role she plays with conviction, and it is good at making a dark relationship feel physically close. The plot holds few surprises, and the supporting cast has little to do. I liked it best in the scenes between Rowe and Zermani, and least whenever it stopped to explain itself. The story itself is not the reason to watch. Rowe is, along with the handful of scenes in which she and Zermani are left alone with each other.