Rating: ?
Dir: Cody Clarke.
Star: Jules Roscoe, Livvy Shaffery.
Have you ever been at a party, where somebody latches onto you and won’t stop talking to you and there’s no way out and they just keep going on and on and you can’t even leave because it’s your party? If not, you can execute a convincing recreation of the scenario by backing into a corner, pulling the TV after you, and watching this. With almost twenty-five thousand words of dialogue here, all provided in voice-over, this description likely makes it seem a test of endurance. And, yet… There’s something to be said for cinema which takes you out of your comfort zone. Here, you are trapped inside someone’s else’s head for 110 minutes. It’s an uncomfortable, sometimes unsettling place to be.
You are accompanying Chase (Roscoe), as she visits a dozen beaches around New York, with the aim of achieving her ambition: death by shark. Though the title acts as a self-spoiler for the movie. There is no shark here – not even a fin glimpsed cutting through the water. Chase tells us, “They really don’t do that fin-above-the-surface thing.” On each beach, she observes, interacts with and dismisses other visitors, dissecting them in usually scathing terms. Because Chase is certainly not short of merits in her own mind. “I’m very intelligent,” she tells us. “My thoughts are as worthwhile and interesting as I am beautiful.” After hearing similar sentiments expressed repeatedly by Chase, in slightly different ways, you’ll be forgiven for being firmly on #TeamShark.
And, yet… [v2.0] Maybe Stockholm Syndrome eventually kicks in. I found myself occasionally nodding in agreement, such as with her hatred of Spielberg, for unleashing a shark holocaust with Jaws. “When Steven Spielberg dies one day, I hope that he goes up to heaven, and God is a shark.” Eventually, on Plumb Beach, Brandie (Shaffery) hijacks the voice-over, and I was… annoyed at the interruption? It was like, in that party scenario, somebody else had shoehorned themselves into the conversation uninvited. Brandie is, in some ways, Chase’s opposite. Blonde where Chase is dark, and Jaws is her favourite film. She’s younger, still a teenager, and lacks the same level of cynicism. However, like Chase, she wants to be eaten by a shark.
I defy anyone to tell me they guessed how this would end. Seriously. It’s sheer genius: complete nonsense, and yet [v3.0] absolutely fitting. It feels as if the appearance of Brandie, a fellow traveller on the road to buffetdom, pushes a button in Chase. She instinctively knows she is no longer a unique snowflake, and she’s not happy about it. By the end, this had become not what I expected at all. “Angsty and existential!”, as the cover states? Absolutely. To a degree almost unsurpassed in any film I’ve ever seen, and it may well solidify your hatred of Gen Z and their issues. However, for one last time: and yet… I ended up feeling far more connection to Chase than I expected twenty minutes into this.