Open Water
If you saw the trailer for “Open Water,” you experienced the absolute height of terror brought about by the film’s terrifying concept: what happens when two divers are accidentally abandoned in the middle of shark-infested seas. It’s brilliant in a no-budget, lets-get-right-in-there-with-those-sharks way, since that’s what the actors and filmmakers did; and in doing so, they’ve reminded us that film – absent special effects and incomprehensibly large budgets – is still the potent storytelling medium it was upon its invention. And in its crude way, “Open Water” delivers on the promise of its trailer, which had audiences literally jumping out of their seats.
What you didn’t see in the trailer is the egregiously boring eighty minutes which surrounds those brief attacks… and the trite outline of the relationship of the divers, whose utter blandness undermines the dramatic tension of the experience.
Before ripping the film to shreds (tragic metaphor), it’s important to applaud the courage of any independent filmmaker – especially those who evade the traditional occupational sharks of Hollywood inflexibility and pandering for the real toothy thing. The filmmaking duo of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau happily threw themselves and their two leads (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) in the shark-infested waters off Bermuda for over 120 nail-biting hours of principal photography. And the payoff is tremendous: you cannot easily replicate the remarkable footage of people literally surrounded by an ocean of gray death. When the sharks are in the picture, the tension is terrific, the authenticity of the events incredibly chilling.
Hence the problem: the sharks are the only truly interesting part of the film. Notwithstanding a daring ending which takes the story for an unexpected (but ultimately realistic) twist, the human drama on display here is largely inconsequential. We watch as Daniel and Susan load the car for their vacation, check into their hotel, lounge on the beach, go shopping, fail to have sex, and spend an infuriatingly long time swatting flies in the middle of the night. It’s an incredibly colorless twenty minutes of a wait before the duo ever get a toe wet; ostensibly present to explain the pre-existent strains of their relationship so that we can later watch it unravel. Aside from the evident requirements of “feature-length,” it’s difficult to imagine why the filmmakers didn’t feel that the pressure of abandonment, dehydration and potentially being eaten alive wasn’t sufficient for dramatic purposes – but believe it or not, those subjects go largely unexplored. Instead of truly probing the slow disintegration of society’s definitions and complexities into the austere realities of life and death, we’re forced to be content with floating domestic squabbles and finger-pointing. It’s true that those picayune issues would surface and anger/frustration would take hold, but there are more stages to helplessness and the realities of probable imminent death than “it’s your fault, honey.” And we’re robbed of that potentially vital human story, most likely because while Kentis and Lau know how to photograph sharks, they are not writers up to the task of probing complex human psychology in the face of sudden, inescapable calamity.
For most of the picture, therefore, we’re waiting for these two to be eaten or rescued; and deprived as we are of a compelling reason to empathize with the characters, it’s difficult to care about which of the two paths the story takes. Personally, I was rooting for the sharks.
