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 Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.
Very much a ‘girls can do anything!’ movie, it plunges 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.
