Open Water
Imagine you've surfaced to get back on the tour boat and found nothing but an empty, 360-degree expanse of sky and water. The boat has left without you.
Now: Imagine a shark fin breaking the water.
This is all that "Open Water" has going for it. It's enough. Chris Kentis's minimum opus is the kind of movie that makes a mockery of star ratings: It's ridiculously cheap and terrifying at the same time. A word-of-mouth hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film's a no-budget (all right, $130,000), digitally shot, edited-in-a-garage hair-raiser that was dubbed " `Blair Witch' meets `Jaws.' " That calculus is on the money, but it's worth noting that "Water" is a more professional piece of work than the found-object "Blair" and that the cinematography is the least scary thing here.
Taking off from the sort of nightmare you have between mojitos at Club Med -- and which possibly happened to an American couple off Australia's Great Barrier Reef in 1998 -- "Open Water" introduces us to Susan and Daniel (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis). They're attractive in a generic way; even the actors' names have the functional blandness of soap actors or porn stars. So do the performances, at least while the movie's on dry land.
On vacation somewhere in the tropics, Susan and Daniel take a tour boat out to scuba dive a submerged reef. They're experienced divers, and while they're off on their own the guides topside are busy miscounting heads. When the two pop up to the surface, not only has the boat left for port but they're already being swept out to sea by a powerful current.
For the rest of "Open Water," we stick with Susan and Daniel, through sunburn and dehydration, through hopes raised and dashed and raised again, through arguments that seem cosmically petty given the allegorical direness of the situation. When Susan explodes "I wanted to go skiing!" we can't help but laugh, both because these two seem almost too small for their circumstances and because we're nervous as hell, too.
As we should be, given the sharks.
They come around slowly, are gone for long swaths of time, then reappear with a flick of a fin and a sandpaper brush against the leg. They hint at the vast predatory world below the surface for whom Susan and Daniel are little more than chum. The fact that the film's budget didn't allow for CGI trickery or protective cages -- that we're seeing the reality of two actors in the water surrounded by sharks -- further ratchets up the tension. Does that crack in the voice come from Susan? Or from the woman playing her?
"Open Water" is a stunt, one you either buy into or not. You may not be able to get past the low-rent cinematography, writing, and performances, or you may simply like a little more narrative meat on your movie's bones. For others, it's the very simplicity that's the hook -- the way the film uses our current language of "realism" to lull us into suspending disbelief. Handheld video imagery, natural sound, long takes, no soundtrack music: It's like reality TV, except the threat of disaster is topic A instead of implied subtext.
As fumbling and limited as it is, "Open Water" succeeds: The film puts you at sea level with horizon all around and makes you feel very, very vulnerable. Kentis shows what he's able to as straightforwardly as possible, and what he can't show, he lets you imagine. If you subtract the sharks, that's close to a working definition of cinema itself.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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