Director: Johannes Roberts
Year: 2017
Country: United Kingdom/USA/Dominican Republic
Alternate Titles: In the Dark
Genre: Sharks
Plot:
On a vacation together in Mexico, two sisters agree to go on an underwater cage-dive as a means to have an adventure together, but when an accident strands them on the ocean floor with a diminishing air supply they must brave the shark-infested waters to water the surface and get to safety.
Review:
For the most part, this was a big disappointment. Among the film’s problems here is the film’s prominent display of stupidity for setting everything in motion. The sense of personal safety checks that are bypassed here simply to undertake this incident which starts with the trip being done because of an off-hand comment told by a spiteful ex-boyfriend. Done with no build-up as for why that comment means anything anyway coming from an ex-boyfriend, that such an unimportant remark means that she then continually ignores every common sense of self-preservation to get onboard the boat and head out with that rickety, rusted equipment is just absolutely ridiculous.
Likewise, the film’s strong technical flaws come through rather strongly. Despite plenty of accurate and wholly intelligent reasoning about the unwanted ascension to the surface from that depth, the fact that they’re even alive at such a location without being crushed under the water pressure is a severe issue here. They’re only equipped with flimsy wetsuits and are unprotected otherwise, that they’re able to survive the experience is quite troubling and generates some major problems here. As well, with all the blood in the water from their injuries that they're not bleeding out faster is wholly problematic and not entirely realistic.
The last major problem here is the genuinely troubling lack of shark action for much of the film. They have such a minor role throughout here that they’re almost an afterthought to the more prominent survival thriller aspect of the scenario. Instead of continually coming down to the cage to check out the strange object in their environment, the sharks are instead presented as the underlying obstacle to prevent their ascent to the surface and keep them on the ocean floor where they can engage in an extended series of tasks designed to stall for time as if a back-up plan wasn’t put into motion, the end result is that the sharks don’t play as much of an issue as they should’ve been.
That said, there are some real positives to be had here. The main scenario about being trapped in such a situation, lowered to the bottom of the sea with rapidly-expiring air and killer sharks around them, comes off as a genuinely terrifying situation that has some merit to it. That splits the film nicely into halves with the survival drama first half giving way to shark attacks in the second half as they manage to interject some extra intensity and suspense in their quest to escape while the various attacks that do occur are carried off with genuine thrills. Given some of the savagery inherent in these scenes and generating some of the only blood-flow in the film, these are what hold the film up but not enough to overcome the flaws present.
Overview: **/5
While this is filled with several flaws including both technical and storyline issues that are quite hard to overlook, the fact that there are just enough positives to make this watchable leaves this a somewhat underwhelming mainstream shark effort. Really give this a shot if you’re a shark movie enthusiast or prefer the mainstream films over the cheesy shark films, while viewers turned off by the flaws or not interested in the positives should heed caution.
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