Young Woman and the Sea review: "Daisy Ridley pulls off this handsome biopic with style"

young woman and the sea
(Image: © Walt Disney Studios)

GamesRadar+ Verdict

Daisy Ridley pulls it off with sty༺le in this wholesome but enjoyable old-school Channel-swim biopic.

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Cinema’s recent roster of female long-distance swimming stories, like the doughty Nyad and Vindication Swim, gets a medal-worthy new entrant in this heartwarming and handsomely produced biopic of Trudy Ed🌸erle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.

Very much a ‘girls can do anything!’ movie, it plu🌳nges slight and sickly New Yorker Trudy (a determined Daisy Ridley) into conflict with her stern German immigrant father (the nicely gruff Kim Bodnia) as she pursues forbidden swimming lessons and enters ‘indecent’ trial competitions. Soon, she’s neck-deep in local records and trophies. 

Director Joachim Rønning, veteran of family-friendly fare like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Pirates of 🍃the Caribbean: S🔯alazar’s Revenge (2017) and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), gives the broad-strokes script a glossy, period-perfect New Yawk🐎 setting, full of post-WWI patriarchal attitudes that Trudy fights as tenaciously as the waves.

Engagingly, Ridley brings the winning combo of pluck and vulnerability of Star Wars’s Rey to Trudy, struggling with the family pressure to be a married shop-girl rather than a life-risking Channel swimmer. It’s all a tad Disneyfied (no Nyad rage here), yet the film finds fun in Trudy’s wild bet that she can swim from NY to New Jersey, and in her persistent defiance of US Olympic blowhards and devious, women-hating Channel-swim coach Wolffe (a tooth-grindingly villainous Christop꧅her Eccleston).

It all adds up to a genuinely affecting, Seabiscuit-style underdog tale, which will get you cheering dogged Trudy past 10f𝓀t waves, a shoal of stinging jell✨yfish, and a plague of obstructive men. That salty liquid on your face isn’t sea water – it’s tears.


Young Woman and the Sea releases i𓃲n select theaters May 31 across the U🧸S and UK.

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Kate is a freelance film journalist and critic. Her bylines have appea♏red online and in print for GamesRadar, Total Film, the BFI, Sight 🅠& Sounds, and WithGuitars.com.