Young Woman and the Sea review – handsome if formulaic 1920s swimming biopic

You wait years for a stirring feminist true-life endurance swimming drama, then two come along within 12 months of each other. Young Woman and the Sea stars Daisy Ridley as Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle, the plucky butcher’s daughter from New York who, in 1926, became the first woman to swim the Channel. It follows Nyad, starring Annette Bening as Diana Nyad, who in 2013 swam from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64.

What we learn from watching both in relatively quick succession is that there are only so many ways that directors can inject tension into the inherently monotonous act of ploughing through the ocean for hours on end. Jellyfish peril figures prominently in both films, as does unprocessed childhood trauma. In the case of Ederle, a close brush with death as a young child battling measles means that she was subsequently treated as the runt of the family, and later her all-girl swimming team.

The prestige trappings – the 1920s New York and Brooklyn neighbourhoods where the story unfolds are handsomely recreated – go some way towards winning over the audience, as does a peppy and likable turn from Ridley. But Young Woman and the Sea, adapted from a book of the same name by Glenn Stout, is ploddingly formulaic and takes a few too many far-fetched dramatic liberties (the film has her squeezing out of the porthole of an ocean liner and plunging, luggage and all, into the sea in order to make a second attempt at the Channel swim).

• In UK and Irish cinemas now