Deep Fear (2023) by Marcus Adams

Director: Marcus Adams

Year: 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Sharks

Plot:

While living in a tropical paradise, a famous yachtswoman on a trip to visit her boyfriend on a nearby Caribbean island is forced by a group of drug smugglers hoping to recover sunken cocaine of theirs, but when a series of shark attacks prevents the trip, they must find a way to survive.

Review:

This was a decent enough if somewhat flawed genre effort. Among the better features here is the setup to get the characters into the entire scenario which is one of the better excuses to interact with sharks. The initial idea of stumbling upon the couple stranded in the middle of the ocean while she’s on her own trip around the world and deciding to help them offers a rather solid starting point. The desire to help them only to find out the true reason why they’re at the location which puts her and everything she comes across is all decent enough for this kind of effort where the idea of trying to recover the submerged cocaine from the sunken ship only to find it’s in shark-infested waters is all good enough in this kind of feature getting enough to like about it.

That gives the actual attacks here some fun elements where its involvement with the sharks has some fun elements. The initial dive to recover the stranded helper has some genuine tension involving when the truth about their mission is hidden so everything feels like she's trying to genuinely help and making things feel quite suspenseful trying to get past the creatures. The later scenes involving the dives trying to recover the rest of the shipment only to have to resort to several ingenious defensive tactics to have to get by them is all fun enough to keep this one going, and with the fun finale generating some great confrontations with the sharks and some solid human drama that all combine to give everything some fun gore to be worthwhile enough.

There are some issues present with this one. The biggest factor against this one is the nonsensical setup that keeps everyone together for the duration of the film which is quite lame. The idea of only two people involved here holding her captive and forcing everything to happen as it does is quite hard to see play out with everything happening as a blanket fact with very little build-up or purpose with the idea of what’s going on happening given no explanation whatsoever. On top of that, the two-person crew is completely non-threatening making everything feel quite uninspired during a time when it’s important for that to be the case, and it also severely reduces a lot of the tension during the attack scenes when there are no extra bodies to get involved with everything which reduces the chance for extra kills.

The other drawback on display here is the film’s sense of the finale offering way more of a survival thriller stake than a genuine genre feature. The sharks are still present in the scenes but they’re hardly presented as an obstacle to overcome nor is their being stopped a means of escaping the situation. Instead, everything tends to revolve around taking care of the stolen drug shipment and the captors forcing everything along but the sharks tend to disappear here and don't even get the final kill in the film so they’re quite reduced in intensity at this section of the film. Even more is the need to introduce outside characters into the mix for no reason if they’re not going to be involved so their presence is pointless, and overall are the few issues holding this one down.

Overview: ***/5

A solid enough indie shark film, there’s a lot to like with this one while never really rising above that level due to some issues keeping everything in check as it goes along. Those who are fine with those factors, are huge killer shark film fans, or are intrigued by it will want to give it a shot while most others out there turned off by these factors should heed caution.