In August 2000, the Kursk, an Oscar-II class nuclear submarine and flagship of Russia's Northern Fleet, explodes during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea and comes to rest 108 meters down, with 118 sailors aboard. The film traces the Kremlin's fumbling response under Vladimir Putin, the international pressure that followed, and the decision to bring in two Dutch brothers with no prior submarine salvage experience to raise the wreck. Interviews and archival footage reconstruct the sequence of failures, from the torpedo malfunction believed to have triggered the first blast to the fire that set off a second, far larger explosion in the forward compartments. The salvage operation itself, a technically improbable feat of engineering carried out in freezing, high-pressure conditions, gets close attention, alongside the political fallout from Moscow's slow and secretive handling of the rescue attempt. The result is a account of a disaster that became a test of Russian transparency as much as Russian engineering.