SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Underwater delivers some good performances, scares and cinematography, but is weakened by a hollow and largely derivative story.
It’s an oft-cited fact that we know relatively little about our planet’s oceans, and as the saying goes, it’s the unknown that inspires the greatest fear. For that reason I think, there’s no shortage of horror films about what lurks beneath the surface. With Underwater, director William Eubank draws on that very fear to produce a horror film that, despite being entertaining and relatively solid, ultimately isn’t as clever or coherent as the numerous films and games that inspired it.
Underwater follows a team of scientists and engineers trapped in the deepest depths of the ocean after their drilling operation is struck by a mysterious earthquake. With their base severely damaged, they must make their way across the ocean floor in order to find escape pods to get to the surface. However, their efforts to drill into the seabed for valuable resources has disturbed a group of creatures lurking in the depths.
The film takes a page from several books; there’s a splash of Lovecraftian horror and director William Eubank has spoken highly of the video game SOMA too. He tries, perhaps too hard, to nail down precisely what made Alien so iconic. But a monster, a hostile environment and the occasional gratuitous shot of a woman in her underwear does not a horror movie make. Where Scott ensured that his monster needed little to no explanation, I left Underwater wishing that I had learned something, anything, about the deep-sea horror that attacked our crew of hapless scientists and engineers. More frustratingly, there are a few subtle hints that some of our characters know more than they let on. But it’s never followed up on, any twists add little real substance, and we’re left in the dark with a story that doesn’t carry much emotional or thematic weight. Is the whole debacle about the folly of human greed once again? Who knows? It says very little, if anything, at all.
At least the cast are fun to watch, and effort is put in to make the audience care when someone inevitably winds up being offed. They’re a connected group whose interactions with one another reveal more than they initially let on, and we see those bonds tested. Kristen Stewart delivers a standout performance as the engineer Nora (comparisons to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley are apt) while Jessica Henwick’s Emily has the closest thing resembling a character arc, which she effectively brings life to. This is ever so slightly undercut by the fact that they’re both told that they can’t wear much clothing in those diving suits, and so they conveniently spend a lot of the third act in their underwear. Coincidence or contrivance? You decide. T.J. Miller makes an appearance (as do his briefs, so our female characters aren’t totally singled out), to deliver comic relief once again. The film’s audio mix is off, and combined with the film’s frantic camerawork, it can be hard to make out what our characters are actually saying. A lot of dialogue is lost in the noise. They aren’t a difficult bunch to like however. They don’t do anything too unreasonable or stupid, breaking a long-standing horror movie trope, and this film would have been more enjoyable had more time been devoted towards fleshing them out.
The film breaks one of my horror movie cardinal rules by showing its monster for too long, rendering it far less terrifying, but the underwater environment is guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of anyone with a fear of the ocean. It’s dark and murky (like the true nature of the film’s main message), and coupled with claustrophobic close-up helmet shots, a climate of fear and total isolation is quickly created. Its jump scares are more than capable of catching you off-guard and so it becomes genuinely intense at times. The costume designers deserve credit for channelling the Alien DNA by creating the film’s cumbersome heavy-duty diving suits, which really do look the part. A few otherwise imaginative sequences are knocked down by the shaky cam, which makes it hard to tell what’s happening. The general bedlam is far too distracting. The action sometimes works, but not always. It’s hard not to laugh when watching someone drops a line that better fits Aliens than Alien, which then falls flat because Underwater spends most of its setup time prepping the audience for horror and not action.
The end result is a decent horror sci-fi film that derives a lot from other movies but never settles on meaning or depth. It plays an awful lot like Alien but to be fair, a lot of science-fiction horror films do, to some extent. It vaguely tries to set up some kind of potential sequel in the credits which, I have to admit, I would probably go see. The truth is, some horror films get it wrong and at least Underwater, with its likeable crew, decent scares and snazzy diving suits, manages to get some of it right.
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