director/screenwriter/editor
Chris Kentis
producer
Laura Lau
cinematographers
Chris Kentis
Laura Lau
music
Graeme Revell
cast
Blanchard Ryan (Susan)
Daniel Travis (Daniel)
Saul Stein (Seth)
Estelle Lau (Estelle)
Michael E. Williamson (Davis)
Cristina Zenarro (Linda)
John Charles (Junior)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 79m
u.s.
release: 8/6/04
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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About the only thing holding
Open Water back from being an indisputable masterpiece
is the fact that it's a 79-minute movie. It almost needs to be
an experience -- a thrill ride at a theme park, say, in
which we are marooned in darkness and among hungry animals for
24 hours. If any movie could've benefited from being a real-time
Andy Warhol experiment that runs for eight hours, Open Water
might just be it. As it is -- an abbreviated yet often harrowing
fable of the utter insignificance of man and his digital trappings
-- the film is some kind of boiled-down classic, a survival piece
that goes Cast
Away one better, lacking even the comforting stability
of land.
You've probably heard the synopsis:
A yuppie couple, Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis),
go scuba-diving on vacation and are left behind by the boat.
Left behind -- those words, even more than the curious
sharks and the nonchalantly stinging jellyfish, turn our blood
to ice. It's been said that even those who live thousands of
miles away from the ocean were terrified by Jaws, because
(so the theory goes) we evolved into land-walkers in order to
get away from those aquatic things with teeth, and we still carry
a primal fear of sea predators in our cells. Add to this the
childhood fear of being abandoned -- forgotten, disregarded,
as if we never existed. Open Water is no novelty film
like The
Blair Witch Project; the film's director, Chris
Kentis, resents the perhaps inevitable comparisons, and rightly
so. Open Water does, and does brilliantly and economically,
everything Blair Witch fumbled.
Like many horror films, this
is not a nice one. Blame for the affluent white couple's lamentable
situation, if you felt like nitpicking the film's stereotypes, could be distributed
evenly among a squeamish Asian woman who can't handle the dive,
the pushy Jew who borrows her mask so he can dive, and the careless
black guide who gets the head count wrong. Ultimately, though,
the blame falls on Susan and Daniel for presuming to be masters
of their domain, even when hopelessly out of their element. Marooned
at sea, the couple respond with eminent realism: disbelief followed
by dismay followed by despair. This is not an environment that
these two, formerly ensconced in a universe of laptops and cell
phones, can hope to master, much less survive. Open Water
will send control freaks into paroxysms of anxiety: The miles
of ocean beneath you and around you don't care who you are.
You are a molecule, you are driftwood, you are amusement
for sharks.
The acting at the very beginning
is somewhat blank, I assume by design. Susan and Daniel are your
typical eternally distracted drones, digitally attached to their
jobs. Susan in particular is plagued by calls from the office,
even when readying for departure; how much she would give to
have an annoying cell phone a day or so later. The yuppies yearn
for a temporary escape from civilization, and get it with a vengeance.
Daniel at one point lets out the essential yuppie howl at the
injustice of his fate: not "Why us?", not "God,
help us!", but "We paid to do this!" In
context the line is horrifyingly funny, trumping by far the various
outbursts of frustration in Blair Witch.
As the movie proceeds, the
characters are stripped down to their basics, and Ryan and Travis
do a heroic job of submitting to the unforgiving elements. These
whitebread breadwinners are reduced to their skins and nerve
endings, buffeted about by weather, casually bumped by sharks
who seem to regard our protagonists as too inconsequential
to bother eating -- just yet. Far from being a minimalist rewrite
of Jaws, Open Water taps into the current fear
of being impersonally destroyed by unseen forces that don't care
if we live or die. It also touches our experiences in other,
less direct ways: Susan and Daniel could just as well be sitting
in a hospital's waiting room, dreading bad news. Sooner or later
we all face the cold knowledge that the universe doesn't really
take notice of us, that the bodies we worry about so much are
subject to invasion by cancer, heart disease, or any number of
other things that don't care how well our jobs are going or what
our dreams are. Open Water does what all classic horror
does: it makes us stare death in the face and recognize the face
as our own.
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