Release Date: August 6, 2004
Starring: Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis
Directed by: Chris Kentis
Written by: Chris Kentis
Distributed by: Lions Gate Films
MPAA Rating: R (language, some nudity)
In the end, I felt betrayed by Open Water, an enticing minimalist thriller written and directed by Chris Kentis that ends with far less promise than it begins. But of course this is what your friends will tell you about this movie. What they may not tell you is that there are some juicy bits in the middle, and a legitimately nerve-wracking environment of fear that is, only in the long run, undermined by the sheer inertia of the plot.
It was filmed entirely on digital video, a format that gives filmmakers a ready veneer of enhanced realism because it looks like what we’re watching is someone’s home movie. In this sense Open Water is sort of like The Blair Witch Project set in the middle of the Caribbean, and the degree to which you enjoyed that movie is probably a fairly strong indicator of how much you’ll like this attempt at faux cinéma vérité.
Instead of student filmmakers, the leads are a married couple, Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis), who -- in an attempt to briefly escape their overstressed, career-driven lives -- have booked a last-minute vacation to a nameless Caribbean resort town. There they board a tour boat for an afternoon of scuba diving, but due to an extraordinary (and, frankly, preposterous) mix-up, the boat leaves them behind in the middle of the ocean.
Thus begins a nightmare of abandonment, as Susan and Daniel float helplessly in the water, at the mercy of sharks, the elements, and each other. The acting is as flat as the digital cinematography, but there is the sense that Ryan and Travis are acting down, turning in muted performances in hopes of drawing the audience into the movie. Much like another 2004 feature, the excellent docudrama Touching the Void, Open Water tries very persistently to get you to believe that what is happening is real.
It’s not, of course, but it may have you talking to the characters as if they were real. Knowing the plot, the scuba-diving scenes at the beginning are filled with an atmosphere of dread, and you want to shout at Susan and Daniel to stop screwing around and surface before the boat leaves without them. Then their first moments of isolation are marked by indecision -- they see boats on the horizon, but are reluctant to make a swim for it because they reason that their own boat could return at any minute -- and you want to scream at them to do something, anything.
Susan and Daniel, though, are overly polite, the way people are when there’s a rift forming between them and neither wants to acknowledge it. In the scenes leading up to the scuba trip, Daniel is slightly passive-aggressive, Susan is clearly preoccupied, and in general there is a bit of tension between the two, all of which leads to a predictable series of scenes in the water in which the two take their frustrations out on each other. Weaknesses like these cast a shadow of a doubt on the possibility of survival; unlike the mountain climbers in Touching the Void (who were also done in, to some degree, by their own hubris), Susan and Daniel are clearly overmatched by nature’s arsenal -- including numerous sea creatures and a raging thunderstorm -- and it will take a miracle for them to pull through.
Foremost among the obstacles in their path are the increasingly and alarmingly numerous sharks (which are real, not animatronic or computer-enhanced). Daniel claims to know a few things about sharks, culled from Discovery Channel programming, but there’s probably a good chance he’s bullshitting. Which makes Susan’s sudden dependency on Daniel more than a little unsettling -- she’s taking her chances with this guy?
As the sharks show up more often, and in bigger numbers, and get closer, and braver, they become a kind of punctuation for Kentis’s film grammar. The movie staggers forward in blocks, many of which involve the ominous presence of sharks but never result in anything except a sickening sense of dread. This is indicative of the film. Open Water is about the precipitation of fear, not the actual study of it. This movie wants to put you on the edge of your seat as often and for as long as it can, but there is no more to it than that.
Like The Blair Witch Project, much of the scary parts are at least half imagination -- Kentis makes frequent use of suggestion, like a shark fin briefly seen, to set the mood. And like Blair Witch, it isn’t until the last 15 minutes when things really start to happen. The ending here is just as abrupt and severe, like an exclamation point, but also unsatisfying, because it doesn’t give you anything to take away from the film -- unless, of course, you favor literalist interpretations like, “That’s why I’m never going scuba diving.” The coda, which plays next to the end credits, lends Open Water a bit of very macabre humor, but it still leaves you empty-handed, wishing that the conclusion was as profound as the production was austere.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)