Reviewed by Tim Wong

THE SCARY MOVIE, perhaps more so than any other, succeeds or fails on the whim of its audience. It's like the whole "love stories are an inherently fickle thing" thing – a line by my co-editor I've revisited quite pathetically now twice in succession. The same tenuous crux should apply here to Open Water – a high-concept, low budget grenade-of-a-movie, pulling the pin on that most primal of all fears: the shark attack.


Only as if by genetic design, the film inherits a predator's instinct, zeroing in on that pliable side of human consciousness susceptible to Jaws, H20, and the National Geographic. Sure enough, we've seen the Spielberg movie; read about sharks; heard of their victims; suffered some minor traumatic event involving water before. They're collective experiences that add up to something plausible – something just real enough for us to identify with. Unlike the masked psychopath, the haunted house, or the she-devil with a beady eye and bad head of hair, Open Water isn't the type of scary movie to rely on an intangible terrorism – the kind that rubs people up with wild imaginations the wrong way. Toying with the inconceivable or the unknown, it's here they're normally at their most fickle – dependent on that make-or-break "suspension of belief", and especially liable to crumbling under the jaded, desensitised grip of someone like me.

I say this, because the last time I was really scared – when my vital organs chugged to a halt, when I couldn't bear to watch, when I needed something to grip and squeeze the life out of – was during The Dark Crystal. As a kid, all fantasy movies of that era – Labyrinth, Krull, The Empire Strikes Back – seemed to adopt the same dark, Svankmajer, evil forestry aesthetic which frankly, scared the living the shit out of me. One day, as if struck down by the golfer's yips, I lost all that. Forgot how to be scared. Didn't need to stay awake incase Freddy hijacked my dreams. For years, the scary movie failed to tickle me. And I missed being tickled.

Now, it's 2004, I'm seated at The Paramount, and the lights go down. Two actors, Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan, ham through some lathered-up conversation, before setting up the tropical vacation scene. They take one of those group scuba diving sorties out into the middle of the ocean, and it's at this point we encounter the film's most important plot detail: the diving instructor can't count. Dan and Blanch end up getting left behind, bobbing up and down like two rubber duckies in God's aromatic bathtub – I swear you could hear the Kenny G. Not much later, a dorsal fin here, a tail slash there. Some encircling. And then BOOM! A couple several places across from me practically rip the entire row of seating from the theatre floor, reeling in shock. They laugh at themselves, nervously, as if to concede they had just been scared shitless. And for the first time in a long time, I had to concede too.

Over a handful more pinprick moments, Open Water managed to remind me what it was like to be scared. Not all-consuming scared, mind you – but in short, adrenaline-loaded bursts, it was there, lurking under the tide, waiting, and pouncing with considerably timing. Granted, it also preyed on my phobia of the deep blue sea and its creatures that lie beneath, crossing that clearly defined line between our world and theirs. The film's reputable killers are for real too – cold-blooded, non-hydraulic, and in the flesh – and I doubt there's a sane human being out there who wouldn't find the notion of a hungry, pissed off shark, cardiac-arresting.

If anything threatens to break the surface tension, it's Open Water's tipsy wavelength between hyper-realism and soapy dramatics. When the sharks aren't biting a chunk out of someone's leg, they're allowing us to witness character repartee straight out of Days of Our Lives – fine, if this were in 35mm with Jerry Bruckheimer producing, but the DV format so obviously lends itself to a mode of cinema verité under Kentis' direction, that the heady illusion of authenticity is spoilt whenever we pause for dialogue. Touching the Void – another shit-in-the-pants true story of peril – avoided this by letting its survivors narrate while supplying the actors' with lines consisting mainly of grunts and screams of agony. Of course, by now, it's fairly clear Open Water has no survivors – just two dots, alone in the ocean, petrified like you and I would be. Unlike Void's inflated spectacle on the "one that got away", this shark's tale feels unembellished, horrific, and painfully hopeless – the onset of futility perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.