Ahoy, squirts! Ya'll know me. Know how I earn a livin'! hehe Quint here with a very grounded review of OPEN WATER. I am DYING to see this flick! Shark infested water? Indie horror? I'm so there it's not even funny. Anyway, here's the review... It's a 20 footer... 25. Three tons of him... No, not Harry! It was from JAWS... Oh, never mind! Read the friggin' review already!
Hey guys, I saw the first SIFF screening of Open Water tonight at the Egyptian theater in Seattle. The theater was as packed as I’ve ever seen it, but I usually only go there for the occasional midnight movie. The screening was attended by writers/directors/married couple Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, and their adorable little girl. Chris gave some brief introductory remarks, but nothing very substantial was said, other than disclaimers that we weren’t seeing the final print (though it was on film, and this was the first 35mm screening of the movie), final sound mix, etc. Before Open Water we saw a short film called Wrong Way Up, directed by Gabriel Hardman, who is apparently working as a storyboard artist on Logan’s Run with Bryan Singer. It’s an amusing (and creepy) short about two guys who are trying to sneak some illegal tarantulas across the US border from Mexico. Nice way to set up Open Water.
OPEN WATER
The plot is a simple one – we’re introduced to a couple, Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis), just as they are leaving their driveway for a vacation in some tropical paradise. We can see by the way they interact that they have been together for a while – and that things are bumpy, at best, in their relationship. They’re doing what many of us do when we’re in a rut with a partner – taking off to somewhere sunny that’s as far away as can be from their regular lives, to hopefully reconnect with some “quality time.”
Even in paradise, however, things remain prickly. We see scenes of them gamely playing the “tourist game,” but neither of their hearts are in it. And then one morning they get up early for a guided group dive, several miles out to sea. Once in the water, they swim a little too far away from the main group, and a simple (and crucially, believable) counting error results in them being accidentally left behind… in shark-infested waters. The rest of the film is dedicated to answering the question, “Just what the !@#&?! are they gonna do now?”
I found the early scenes a little uncomfortable and stilted. I have to admit that early in the movie I found myself adjusting to how the movie looks, which may have affected my perceptions of these early establishing scenes – it was shot on digital video, and we were seeing the very first screening of a 35mm print. Overall, the movie looks good, but it’s very obvious that it’s a video film. I noticed the uneven (and unfinished) sound mix in a few spots; there were some great rumbling hi-fi effects like car doors slamming, airplane engines roaring, etc., which would suddenly cut to a dialogue scene that sounded like something you’d shoot with your camcorder. It might be wise to loop some of that dialogue. The director mentioned that they were inspired by and in some ways emulating the Dogma 95 style of filmmaking (whose rules I’m not intimately familiar with - I’m not THAT much of a film geek) which I guess supports making films as “realistic” and “unpolished” looking as possible. In that sense, it succeeds, but a mainstream audience used to slick reality TV (which the movie resembles at times, thanks to the “video-ness”) might find themselves shifting in their seats in the early going.
However, once the two leads are stuck in the water in the middle of freaking nowhere, the tension starts building and becomes almost unbearable. The actors, neither of whom I’d ever seen before, really shined in this section of the flick; I found their conversations authentic and heartbreaking. I’m not going to give away any of what happens to them – but I’ll say that it took a long time on my drive home before the knot in my stomach fully went away.
The audience was into the movie – responding well to various moments of slight comic relief, gasping and groaning in all the right places. I was completely absorbed; the feeling of dread just gets more and more oppressive with every passing minute. The ending will be controversial. It definitely affected the mood of the audience in the Egyptian, and somebody asked the directors in the post-screening Q&A whether or not Lion’s Gate, who will be distributing the movie nationally in August, asked them to change the ending. Kentis and Lau said that Lion’s Gate has been completely supportive, and not a frame has been changed since LG acquired the movie at Sundance. Kentis mentioned that audiences are conditioned by “shark movies” to expect one of two possible endings (you figure it out), and that they wanted to present a third option. I will say what happens took me off guard, but the more I think about it, the more I like it; I’m not often surprised by a movie these days, and I like that they “got” me. Kentis is right, I am conditioned by what I’ve seen before, and I like that he was toying with my expectations – although I had a distinct sense that many in the audience around me had the opposite reaction.
Even though it’s obviously a “low-budget” production, it never looks cheap, and the editing is largely effective. Even with the video format, there are some starkly beautiful and terrifying shots – the scene at night during a thunderstorm stands out in my mind. And except for my reservations with the early scenes, the acting overall is very good – these seem like real people, and we root for them. I only noticed one continuity error which, I admit, I noticed largely because of my red-blooded American male-ness. There’s a shot of Ryan who is very, very naked except for a pair of panties she’s got on – until we cut to a different angle where it suddenly very obvious that she’s suddenly NOT wearing said panties anymore. What can I say, she’s gorgeous, she was naked, I was looking, I noticed. Come on, if you’re gonna go the Full Monty, then go the Full Monty already.
Something that came out in the Q&A after the show was a little info about how the movie was made, and when I heard it was shot over 2.5 years, on weekends and vacation breaks, my admiration for it increased by several notches. The fact is, the technology exists now to make and edit feature films independently far less expensively than ever before – but you still have to get up off your ass and do it. The fact that these directors had the stamina to bring the movie to fruition over that long a period, all the while working day jobs, is truly something worth applauding. And I would say to all those grumbling Seattle hipsters I heard on the way out – put up or shut up, brah. It’s easy to sit back and pick apart stuff from under your hipster haircuts while slurping your 17th cappuccino of the day; you think you can do better, get out there and do it, or shut the fuck up. The directors seemed still somewhat stunned that their little flick got picked up for distro at Sundance in what they characterized as a “storybook” fashion. What I saw on the screen was an obvious and effective labor of love. I don’t know how big the release will be, but I think word-of-mouth will be strong. This is a great little thriller well worth checking out. I’ll probably catch it again in August just to support it, and also to see what changes/updates the filmmakers end up putting in. I gave it a “4” out of 5 on my little SIFF ballot.
I’ll be attending several more flicks at SIFF over the next coupla weeks, including Garden State, Before Sunset (preceded that same day by Before Sunrise), that Metallica doc, and another doc about the White Stripes. I’ll send in reviews of those as I catch ‘em.
Keep up the good work,
-Yogi
