Rating: C
Dir: Justin Shilton, Rob Zazzali
Star: Alexandra Corin Johnston, Sumayyah Ameerah, Nick Tag, Ryan Bertroche
a.k.a. Blondie Snaps. OK, it’s not, but my first instinct at the end was to watch one of the best werewolf films ever. I feel it was a significant influence on this, though Shark Girl is the “We have Ginger Snaps at home” version. I was expecting – or, at least, hoping for – an aquatic version of The Fly. I should perhaps have been more specific with my wishes, and clarified that I meant Cronenberg’s remake, not the original. For effects-wise, this begins and ends with a mouthful of teeth. Would it have killed the makers to glue a fin on her back? Hell, paint a pair of gills on her neck. Is that too much to ask?
Apparently, yes. The titular creature is Heidi (Johnston), an influencer whose content creation session on Venice Beach goes wrong when she is bitten by a shark. Not just any shark: one which had been mutated by a radioactive leak from the nearby nuclear power plant. This causes Heidi to become predatory, chewing down on anyone in the vicinity. Early victims include sleazy boyfriend Ron (Bertroche) and a rival influencer. Her increasingly erratic behaviour alarms best friend Sienna (Ameerah), now a shark researcher – especially after Heidi eats Sienna’s brother. Together with high-school classmate Christopher (Tag), who is a budding investigative journalist, they find a serum which can perhaps reverse the mutative effects. However, convincing Heidi to take it, might be another matter.
If you can get past the very weak presentation of the shark girl, this is okay. A lot of the people who get eaten deserve their fate, and gradually Heidi comes to embrace her new-found ability to take no shit. However, this does sit at odds with the genuinely innocent victims, such as Sienna’s brother, and makes it rather hard to root for her without reservation. There are some interesting conspiratorial elements, Sienna getting a lot of info from a YouTube channel called “Truth Jedi”, which discusses things like seals turning cannibalistic in the wake of Fukushima (not a real thing). The ending then hints at her being recruited by a MiB-like secret organization, and I would be at least somewhat interested in seeing where that might go.
There are other areas where it feels there was untapped potential. The whole “influencer” thing is discarded after the first third, when it could certainly have been mined for additional satirical results. Indeed, Heidi gets increasingly back-burnered the further on we go, in favour of Sienna and Christopher. They’re not as interesting, I think, and the film suffers as a result. The film just about skates by, on the strength of moments such as Sienna temporarily paralyzing Heidi by booping her on the snout (which is a real thing in sharks: tonic immobility). It just feels like an idea in need of considerably greater resources to do it justice. Maybe Brandon Cronenberg can remake this in a couple of decades. [H/T to Tony for pointing out this one to me]