FILM REVIEW: Open Water
OPEN WATER (Lion’s Gate Films)
Release date: August 20, 2004
Directed by: Chris Kentis
Starring: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis
Scary sharks are as old as the Hollywood blockbuster itself. Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s whopping 1975 tale of a grumpy Great White, is most often tagged as the film that ushered in the era of movies big on budget, while light on intelligence, craft and depth (although the original Jaws straddled that era and the preceding Golden Age of American cinema, still stands as a fine example of how to mix high entertainment with at least mediumish art).
As such, it should be no surprise that Open Water, Chris Kentis’ new low-budget tale of aquatic terror, uses the sinister-finned beasties as its primary hook. If nothing else, Jaws proved that people like to be scared by sharks; they’re mean-looking, hungry for blood and mostly invisible, and there are enough true-life stories of unwitting swimmers getting limbs chomped off to keep the fear factor high.
Plus, they’re a lot easier to market than the real monster at the heart of Open Water: the briny, indifferent sea. Traditionally, the desert is supposed to be the cruelest of nature’s great expanses — a hostile, death-infested hell to Mama Ocean’s cool undulating arms. But here, Kentis and his two heretofore unknown leads (and the only people on screen for most of the film’s tense 78 minutes) revel in the dark, inhospitable nature of the surf, mining most of the film’s most haunting moments — not from frenzied fishies, but from the sheer power and magnitude of plain old water.
Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) are workaholics whose sex life is as animated as a belly-up goldfish. Their beach vacation is supposed to be a relaxing break from their hectic city lives, but when they wander too far from their dive boat on a scuba expedition, they get left behind to fend for themselves in increasingly frigid and shark-infested waters.
The premise really is that simple, and so it’s to Kentis’ credit that the film never really drags. Setting the mood with some lovely, unsettling macro shots of tropical flora and fauna, he hits his groove when Blanchard and Travis hit the water. By the time they’re tooling around the bottom of the sea, ogling spiny urchins and strange fish, the suspense is already palpable.
As their situation gets desperate (the advancing time is periodically displayed onscreen), the actors morph from tight cardboard yuppies into real people, all the better to pity when a boat misses their signals, a storm hunkers down to rage or — of course — a seething group of sharks whizzes by. Everyone knows by now that the film’s sharks are real, trained to ignore the human actors (who spent ample hours in the water with them), but the scares never have the air of a gimmick. Kentis uses the animals sparingly, careful to heed the lesson learned from Blair Witch — what you can’t see is always scarier.
In the end, Open Water reveals itself as less a monster movie than a tight psychological horror film. It ends on a surprising note, refusing to let the audience off easy, and maintains a high level of tension throughout. All in all, it’s a fine companion to Jaws — except that instead of using sharks to usher in bigger, more expensive scares, it uses them to prove that great things can be done with nothing but a camera, a couple of actors and a really, really big swimming pool.
