Flasz On Film

The genre of animal attack movies—at least within the parameters of mainstream entertainment—reaches at least as far as to the eponymous release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. And even if we disregard the simple fact that in many ways most movies that came after (Piranha, Piranha 2, Mako, Orca etc.) drew heavily on slasher horrors (which were prominent at the time) as well as giallo, you’d be excused to think that a formula crystallized around the idea of how to execute on a story with a shark in it.

Indeed, there is a recipe for a shark attack movie, and it is essentially a variation on the slasher template. Granted, there are sub-recipes within that recipe just as there are variations to a pizza recipe, but in nearly all cases the general idea stays the same. Flour, water, yeast and salt for the dough. A sauce as a base. Toppings. Cheese. Oven. Collect product. Conversely, to make a shark attack movie work, you need a shark, a cast of would-be victims, an isolated location and a body of water (The Shallows). Anything else is optional, which includes extraneous plotting (Deep Blue Sea), ludicrous world-building (The Meg and its sequel), character drama (Open Water) and so on. However, boiled down to bare essentials, all these movies function based on dropping a bunch of characters into a body of water and adding at least one shark to the equation to see what happens. Again, an extension of the slasher template which basically involves locking a cast of characters in a location and letting a serial killer loose in the area.

Therefore, you can approach a movie like Something in the Water in one of two ways: (1) you can either expect it to execute on the formula and the hope is you can extract enjoyment from re-treading familiar territory in interesting ways, or (2) you can expect it to subvert or deconstruct the formula which would allow you to derive entertainment from the novelty of what the movie is attempting to achieve. And let’s be honest, it is way more likely that a movie would conform to the formula and execute upon it rather than it would try to blaze a completely new trail, which means that—all things being equal and the movie is otherwise competently put together—the idea of having a good time watching it is mostly in your own hands. If for some reason you are vehemently opposed to the notion of watching a formulaic movie deliver on its recipe, you might be setting yourself up for a massive helping of disappointment, just as it would be kind of your fault for choosing to go out to a pizzeria while knowing you don’t like pizza all that much.

Let’s face it: Something in the Water is pretty much a pizza when push comes to shove. It has exactly the right ingredients a movie like this should have and it delivers perfectly on what it is canonically supposed to deliver on. Nothing more, nothing less. Thus, we are introduced to a cast of characters (Hiftu Quasem, Natalie Mitson, Nicole Rietsu Setsuko, Lauren Lyle, and Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart), a group of women—ChatGPT suggests that the collective noun describing a group of women attending a hen do is “gaggle”, so I might as well roll with that—who get together at a Caribbean paradise to send one of them off into marriage. Two of the ladies have some unresolved traumas to work through, some of which we witness in the cold opening of the movie, but that’s just seasoning. What matters is that we have the base—a gaggle of would-be victims who decide that with less than one day to go before the wedding it would be a great idea to rent a flimsy-looking boat and head out to spend the day at a secluded beach in the middle of nowhere, sunbathing throwing Frisbees and chilling.

This idyllic arrangement comes to an abrupt end when one of the women gets bitten by a shark (that’s the tomato sauce) while standing in waist-high water. I suppose this is no surprise to anyone who watched Jaws or any quasi-professional documentary about shark attacks, as it seems to be common knowledge that the vast majority of shark attacks take place in shallow waters. This is of course where my repository of random trivia pipes up from a different direction with a snippet of Bill Burr’s comedy routine where he’d follow this up by acknowledging that of course this is where most shark attacks take place, because this is where most people are. You don’t see people in the open water all that much, do you?

But that’s neither here nor there.

The group decide to immediately abort their escapade, clamber onto their boat and power through to find help… only to crash on a reef, punch a hole through the hull of the boat and find themselves treading water in the open ocean. With at least one shark circling them. And that’s your toppings.

Boom. That’s your movie. It is exactly what you should expect if I told you that Something in the Water is a formulaic shark attack slasher, a movie about a group of women being picked off by an apex predator while stuck in a confined location with way of contacting the outside world and seeking rescue. It’s Open Water with more people. Or Jaws 2 without boats. And with a regular-sized shark.

And you know what? If this is what you are after, you will have just about as much fun as you’d have on a night out at Pizza Express, assuming you’re not gluten-intolerant or something. It’s a serviceable, accessible piece of genre filmmaking that makes good use of its template, generates suspense in predictable—yet still effective—ways and puts a bow on things long before you even begin thinking of checking your watch. In and out. Ninety-odd minutes of purely disposable genre fun designed for people who enjoy shark movies of all extractions. No extras. No sprinkles. The shark isn’t massive. The kills aren’t all that inventive. The suspense levels match the stakes of the story.

There it is. The something in Something in the Water is competence in reducing a solid recipe to practice. Which is great. However, don’t be surprised you won’t remember much of this movie by the time you head back to work and someone asks you at the watercooler what you watched this weekend. You may be able to remember the title and the fact it is a shark movie, but not much more. Just as you wouldn’t be able to go into exquisite detail about that trip to Pizza Express. It’s a movie that works in the moment, passes the time and somehow winks at at least one societally relevant concept—acceptance of non-heteronormative relationships—without being decidedly overbearing either.

Passable, accessible, well-produced. Almost completely forgettable. So, please refrain from asking me about any detail concerning this movie as a week from today it will have evaporated from my mind completely.