Item: Treasure of the Wrecked Vessel
Rating: 6.2
Author: Archivist John

If you have a soft spot for heavy metal diving suits that look like giant metal trash cans, you should probably watch Treasure of the Wrecked Vessel tonight. It's a weird Soviet relic from 1935 that will absolutely bore you to tears if you want a fast adventure, but it's gold for anyone who loves old-school maritime grit. ⚓

The whole plot revolves around a salvage crew trying to raise a sunken ship from the bottom of the Black Sea. It's less about the gold and more about the glory of labor, which is very typical for this era.

There is this one guy, played by Nikolay Batalov, who just stares at the water with so much intensity you'd think he was trying to boil it with his eyes. His acting is so big it almost spills out of the screen.

But honestly, the real stars are the diving suits. They look incredibly heavy and dangerous, like something designed by a mad blacksmith. 🤿

At one point, a diver gets stuck, and the movie tries to make it this massive, tense sequence. But the underwater footage is so murky you can barely tell if he's drowning or just having a really slow dance with some seaweed.

It has that same clunky, earnest charm you find in old silent-to-sound transition films like Old San Francisco, where everyone is still figuring out how loud they need to yell. It doesn't have the slick pacing of Telling the World, but it makes up for it with sheer, stubborn atmosphere.

Here are a few things I scribbled down while watching:

The music is so loud during the boring parts and silent when things actually happen.
Andrei Kostrichkin has a face made for silent cinema; his eyebrows deserve their own billing.
I am 90% sure one of the crew members in the background is just asleep in his chair during a crisis.
The water looks incredibly cold. Like, bone-shivering cold.

It’s not a masterpiece, and the propaganda stuff is laid on pretty thick near the end. But those diving scenes have a strange, ghostly weight to them that stayed with me.