Release Date – 20th March 2026, Cert – 12, Run-time – 1 hour 31 minutes, Director – Jeff Tseng
After losing himself in personal and financial struggles Mark Sowerby takes on the Oceans Seven challenge, swimming across seven open water channels, to find himself again.
Film can show off the scale of a mountain’s height easily enough, as seen in something like Free Solo. What it can perhaps struggle to do as well is show the vastness of a sea or ocean in terms of both length and depth. We can still see the physical toll that swimming across a channel for hours on end can take on someone as in trying to find themselves they seem to slightly lose themselves from exhaustion. In this case that someone is Mark Sowerby, a former investment firm owner who stepped down in order to spend more time with his family. After the company collapsed due to short-selling Sowerby put himself into his passion for swimming and eventually decided to take on the Oceans Seven challenge; swimming seven vastly different open water channels.
It’s something very few people (less than 40 at time of writing) people have accomplished, and there are plenty of dangers beyond exhaustion on the line. Yet, what drives Mark, and many others around the world, is both the challenge and achieving a goal, and often something more personal. There’s often the case with a film like this to feel repetitive, both in the swimming and the stories we hear. But, alongside the different obstacles to tackle (from freezing temperatures to jellyfish and cookiecutter sharks) we hear enough that’s different from each figure we see aside from Mark about why they’re taking on the challenge, and what it means to them, to see through the 90-minute run-time.
While Sowerby is the focus of the documentary, I would have personally liked to hear a little more from these other faces. There’s a good few minutes around halfway through where we hear a select number of stories about personal weights and negative memories that open water swimming helps these figures to put aside and deal with. They’re largely glimpses, but still bring more to the personal journeys that form around the challenge, including for Mark’s trainer Tim Denyer who also highlights some of the preparation that goes into each swim.
Yet, through these points there’s a successfully rooted story beyond just the base challenge, which still takes up much of the run-time while maintaining engagement. Mark and wife Heidi have a phrase which crops up a number of times towards the closing stages, ‘it only takes one day to change your life’. It’s something which the film lightly touches upon as its tries to summarise its closing points, but feels as if it could have been more prominent in the idea of finding yourself again amongst the mental and physical challenge of marathon swimming.
A drive for recovery is a shared theme amongst those who take on the challenge, and some of the most engaging points are those where this is talked about, including recovery from swims. Amongst the personal Don’t Be Prey manages to look into the technical aspects of the Oceans Seven challenge, with interviews with creator Steven Munatones, the time and prep that goes into it. There’s an intrigue in the physical nature of the challenge, just how much is gone through over multiple hours and the reminders of the danger at hand. Joined with the personal backings that manage to avoid repetition, there’s a solidly engaging documentary here.
While it could do with a bit more from others taking on the challenge, there’s an engaging nature to Sowerby’s physical and mental journey throughout Don’t Be Prey which largely avoids repetition as it continues to get across the different extremes of the challenge.
Just A Little Bit Random 