Rating: C
Dir: Hayley Easton Street
Star: Hiftu Quasem, Natalie Mitson, Lauren Lyle, Nicole Rieko Setsuko
This is a competent, but almost entirely forgettable entry in the “shark siege” genre. These are the subset of shark films where the victims are stranded – on a disabled boat or sinking island, say. They are then liable to be picked off, one at a time, by circling aquatic predators. There isn’t much room for innovation here. However, it’s all about the execution. A good film-maker can screw up the tension, despite the limited options. Street is making her feature debut, and is not yet a good director. Important caveat: yet. She is adequately competent (there’s the word again), and this has enough flashes of potential to suggest, with more experience, she could become one.
The buffet in this case are five friends, who are all out in the Dominican Republic for the wedding of one of their number, Lizzie (Lyle). They make the ill-advised decision to take a boat out to a desert island, where one of them gets her leg badly bitten by a shark. Her pals attempt to rush her back to the mainland, only for the boat to hit a reef and be holed below the waterline. Once their vessel becomes untenable, they are then forced into the water, and ever closer to the circling predator. Which, in accordance with the unwritten rules of the genre, will only show up when the writer has run out of ideas, gets bored with the characters, and the script demands a little excitement.
That’s why you typically need multiple characters, because you will have to dispose of a few, pour encourager les autres. The only solo shark siege movie immediately coming to mind is The Shallows, and that had to cheat somewhat by dropping in a companion seagull. It’s not hard to work out which of the five here are going to survive or not. There are really only two who are given any characterization to speak of; that’s at the shallow level, and may provoke a modicum of eye-rolling. Let the record show that Chris pronounced her sentence of death at the 15:20 mark: “I can’t wait for them all to get eaten”. By the end, she pronounced herself sixty percent satisfied, if you catch my drift.
The actual attacks are decently done. The first victim has a gnarly leg wound which is impressive, and in general there’s more blood than expected. Shame the makers did not spend more time on the survival horror aspects, and less on the lesbian soap opera ones. I understand the aim is to give us characters with whom we can empathize. However, you might as well try to make the audience feel sympathy for a packet of fish fingers. When the “something in the water” is comprised of equal parts angst and relationship discussions, you are probably heading in the wrong direction. As a result, this ends up much like the boat it contains: a bit flawed, and eventually sinking beneath its own weight.