About two-thirds of the way into Open Water , I realized that my hands weren’t just gripping the armrests, they were actually shaking . If that isn’t the sign of a great horror movie, I don’t know what is.
Open Water stars Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan as a young couple on holiday who pay to go on a scuba diving excursion. Along with eighteen other amateur divers, Daniel and Susan paddle around underwater a bit, petting eels and taking pictures, until it’s time to get back in the boat and go back to the island. Except that Daniel and Susan don’t notice that their time’s up, and thanks to a careless head-count, the boat leaves without them. By the time the two surface, the boat is long gone.
At first our protagonists are annoyed, then incredulous, and then, gradually, over the hours that follow, creeping fear sets in as they realize that they are alone in the middle of a shark-infested ocean, without food or water, being carried further and further away from land by an inexorable tide. By nightfall their ever-worsening nightmare will include stinging jellyfish, seasickness, and bitter, mutual recriminations born of helplessness and panic. And then the sharks begin to bite...
The film plays to our primal fears
Like almost all great horror stories, Open Water makes the mundane terrifying. No one’s really scared of cartoonish bogeymen like Freddy Kruger; what we are all scared of, deep down, is that little, unexpected accident that could suddenly turn a commonplace occurrence into a life-threatening crisis. (What if someone forgot to give this plane I’m on a tune-up, and it suddenly plunges straight down? What if I got hopelessly lost in these woods? What if some morning while I’m waiting here for the subway, some crazy person shoves me in front of a train?) One little twist of fate is all it takes to change the civilized, confident Daniel and Susan into defenseless children, lost in the dark, stalked by monsters.The realistic feel of Open Water is partly due to its spare, economical execution and slightly grainy look. Director Chris Kentis and his wife and fellow filmmaker Laura Lau made the film on location in the Bahamas for a mere $130,000. The swarming sharks are real, and Travis and Ryan really floated in their midst for 120 hours while the camera crew tossed bloody meat into the water to stir them up. Evidently the actors wore body armor under their wetsuits. (Shouldn’t there be a special Oscar category for best performance treading water in chainmail while being nibbled on by freakin’ sharks ? I’ve never seen Meryl Streep do that .)
Daniel’s emotional disintegration
The couple’s acting, a tad shaky in the initial scenes on land, is fully convincing by the time their ordeal is under way, and a very good script allows them to develop into realistic, three-dimensional human beings. Daniel’s emotional disintegration is extremely well played by Travis, as is Susan’s alternating panic, devotion, and bravery by Ryan. The film’s occasionally-heard music score is strange, sounding sort of like a weird cross between a medieval chant and a negro spiritual. It seems like a mistake the first time you hear it, but its mournful, somber, lonely sound grows on you and seems more and more appropriate. Less explicable is the odd montage of footage that plays over the credits; it seems somewhat jarring and out of place.
The most horrific sequence in the film happens at night, while lightning crashes overhead, the sharks lurk below, and the couple seems lost in an infinity of hopeless darkness. The scene haunted my wife and I all the next day. It’s a mercifully brief scene, but one with real and lasting power. Watch it, and then reflect on how many scores of millions of dollars are wasted by Hollywood films that you can’t even remember a half an hour later.
William Tecumsah ShermanAug 11th, 2004 - 21:17:06
Boo yah
Report this comment