A visual and delicately poetic story about the relationship between a swimmer and water. A young Finnish competitive swimmer Sirja Luomaniemi meets the world’s fastest woman swimmer, Therese Alshammar of Sweden, in her dreams and races her.

Crawl is set almost wholly in or by the water. It uses images to explore the significance of water in the philosophy of swimming. It is not a biographical documentary of a swimmer, although the main characters are real competitive swimmers.