Remember to breathe
Underwater thriller offers a quick plunge into fear
In a month when The Mummy and Transformers: The Last Knight are demonstrating the folly of wretched excess, it’s gratifying to see a summer popcorn movie where a simple idea goes a long way. 47 Meters Down is that movie. It’s a thriller of two female divers trapped the title distance underwater in a steel cage, while their oxygen runs down and toothsome sharks circle nearby.
Staring and wondering if and how they’re going to escape redeems the critical cliché “edge of your seat,” despite a few eye-rolling expositional elements. This is not a diving documentary, people, although I don’t think this film does any favours for Mexican tourism or for sharkgazing expeditions.
By my watch it takes just 23 minutes of the film’s commendably brisk 89 minutes to set up the omigod! scenario. Kudos to writer/director Johannes Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera for just getting on with the show, a lesson that guys like Transformers’ Michael Bay could learn from.
Twentysomething sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are vowing to have “the best time ever” during their vacation at an unnamed Mexican resort, despite the ominous foreshadowing of that line and the toppling of a blood-red cocktail into the resort pool.
Haven’t these gals ever seen a horror movie?
Convinced by a pair of randy locals that they haven’t lived unless they’ve gone swimming with sharks, Lisa and Kate sign on for a sketchy private tour led by Matthew Modine’s Taylor, who looks like he’s auditioning to play the Skipper in an indie-film version of Gilligan’s Island.
Older sister Lisa apparently has little or no diving experience, but she needs something to take her mind off being dumped just before the trip by Stuart, her unseen heel of a boyfriend.
Kate, however, is something of div- ing pro, so down they go in a rusty steel cage, suspended by a hoist from the clunker of a boat.
Nail-biting begins shortly thereafter, when a hoist incident occurs and they plummet downward the 47 metres — which sounds even more terrifying when you convert that to 154 feet.
This distance, by the way, is almost equal to the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and about three times the height of the Hollywood sign in L.A. Not that I’m trying to scare you or anything.
Did I mention that Lisa and Kate are running out of air and that sharks of the great white variety are very close by?
Neither Moore nor Holt will win Oscars for their performances, but they adequately convey both fear and resourceful determination. (They’re able to talk to each other because their masks are fitted with microphones and speakers.)
The real stars here are the tech crew: cinematographer Mark Silk, who makes the giant tank used for filming looking like the scariest of ocean water (even if he does nick the dangling-legs shot from Jaws), and also the sound design and CGI technicians who make the depths sound frightful and appear great white-ful.
Remember to breathe.