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47 Metres Down 15 cert, 85 min ★★★★★ Dir Johannes Roberts

Starring Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine

This survival horror has one of those durable, single-location hooks: two scuba-diving sisters are confined for fun in a shark-proof cage when the winch breaks, plunging them in a funfree way to the ocean floor. It’s not the premise that’s the problem. It’s everything else.

Good-time blonde Kate (Claire Holt) is on holiday in Mexico with her sister Lisa (Mandy Moore), who has been dumped by her boyfriend, Stuart, for being too boring, a detail she has kept from Kate as their ill-fated trip begins.

We never meet Stuart, but he sends a bluntly funny text telling Lisa he’s moved out, and seems to have his head screwed on. After an hour of listening to Moore wail, the sharks start to look like the audience’s best friends: Mandy, soon enough, meets Maw.

The script is a particular disaster area. “Emotional” beats between the sisters, dismally mistimed, prompt guffaws. British director Johannes Roberts, a horror specialist for the past couple of decades, earns his fee when the characters clam up and get on with it – but soon they’re gabbing like crazy again and the tension goes flying.

Worst of all is a hysterically inept twist – which appears cribbed, badly, from Neil Marshall’s The Descent – involving nitrogen bubbles to the brain. It becomes hard to tell whether the screenwriters are trying to explain this condition or just suffering from it. Either way, their contrivances are a lead weight no flick could survive. TR