SISTERS FIND DEEP TROUBLE
We might just be in a golden age of woman-versus-shark movies — 2010 gave us The Reef, with Zoe Naylor and a great white off the coast of Australia. Blake Lively battled a particularly tenacious beast in last year’s The Shallows. And don’t forget Anna-Sophia Robb in Soul Surfer (2011), in which a shark attack puts a young woman’s priorities in perspective.
The newest brings together Mandy Moore (Tangled) and Claire Holt in a shark thriller that was originally titled In the Deep, with a planned DVD-only release last summer, until studio heads decided big fish belong on the big screen. The new title is definitely more memorable, although its metric units may confuse U.S. audiences. Why not 51 yards, or 154 feet? Even 26 fathoms has a more nautical ring.
Anyway, the film is about six per cent of a day long.
Lisa (Moore) and Kate (Holt) are sisters vacationing in Mexico. They’re also best friends or, as this movie thinks of them, chums. Lisa, the eldest, has just been dumped by her boyfriend for being too boring, so Kate suggests an exciting afternoon of shark watching, from the safety of an iron cage. Some local guys say it’s great fun, and while both women are wary, the boat’s captain (Matthew Modine) seems to know what he’s doing. So down they go.
Of course, things go wrong; the winch breaks, sending their cage to the bottom of the ocean; I can’t remember exactly how deep, but it’s enough that they can’t contact the boat unless they leave the cage and swim up a bit. But that would put them in the way of sharks, some of which are more than 300 inches long! And to go all the way up too quickly they risk a lifethreatening case of the bends.
Director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (Storage 24, The Strangers 2; the man has a thing for numbers) manages the tension like an expert fisherman, reeling out the line until there’s a little slack, and then pulling us back in with another crisis. The air is running out! The sharks are breaking the cage! Did the boat just leave?
And while the screenplay is a bit on the thin side — there’s a lot of “that shark almost got me!” dialogue — the drama of a dwindling oxygen supply and persistent aquatic carnivores is enough to keep audiences engaged for the movie’s 5,340 seconds. The conflict, like the central plot element, is just deep enough to work.