For fear of committing horror sacrilege, Chris Kentis’s Open Water is more terrorizing than Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. This isn’t to say that the former is the better film for it lacks the aesthetic quality of Spielberg’s early masterpiece, but on a psychological level, it usurps the cinematic master’s aquatic nightmare while doing so on only a fraction of the budget.
A young couple, Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) and Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan), go on a SCUBA vacation in the Caribbean. The day after their arrival, they dive with twenty others. However, when they resurface forty minutes later, their boat is in the distance. It is not until the next morning that someone discovers that the pair is missing.
Open Water is an astounding work in that it not only provokes a reaction in its audience (a rare trait for any film, horror or no) but that it accomplishes such a feat on a budget that is under half of what a big budget’s sound effects bill tallies in at. Kentis’s film was made on 130K, whereas Jaws was allotted 7 million back in 1975. Accounting for inflation, it would bring the latter’s expenditures up to a whopping 174.6 million, by today’s standards.
Kentis’s production, with its visceral, eye-level photography which places the viewer in the undulating sightline of the stranded, eschews the Hollywood glaze that oftentimes dissipates what little suspense has been generated. Its hyperreal plot is paralleled by the film’s documentary-style cinematography by way of a hand-held camera which further, albeit subtly, lends one a sense of authenticity considering our victims, more than likely, brought just such a recording devise with them on their vacation.
Wisely, Kentis is cognizant of his famed forerunner for our leads carry the surnames of the first two victims in Jaws. However, unlike Spielberg’s feature, we empathize with Open Water’s victims, not because we identify with them, but because we are forced to put ourselves in their shoes. As such, Kentis prompts a sense of utter helplessness and complete vulnerability unlike any horror film in recent memory (and possibly ever).
Furthermore, it is the little details which Hollywood overlooks in its rush to create an audience-appeasing storyline which makes Open Water so devastating. Whereas the mundane is largely overlooked in Jaws, Susan and Daniel (as well as ourselves) are forced to contend with the inconveniences which a big budget film makes sure hits the cutting room floor for fear of evoking a yawn. For example, Susan’s Dramamine wears off and, as such, not only is she forced to navigate between a recent jellyfish sting, hunger, and decreasing temperatures–atop her desolate situation–she must now deal with her nausea (to say nothing of the vomitus attracting potential predators). Likewise, as any swimmer knows, the inevitable leg cramp comes to plague Daniel as it further depletes his quickly dissipating energy reserves.
Granted, Open Water does have its failings, such as its stifled dialogue and acting. However, as the film progresses, as if the script and actors are warming up as the film proceeds, the plot takes precedence. Once fully submerged in the story, though the characters are literally merely treading water for over an hour (a masterpiece of Beckettian minimalism if there ever was one), the work takes a life of its own as the naturalistic progression from joking disillusion, to panic, to pragmatism, to fatigue and hunger-induced rage, all amid perpetual susceptibility, thrusts the viewer into a constant state of anxiety.
It is within the confines of Kentis’s existential dilemma that he trumps the plight within Jaws for, in the latter, there are the reprieves of the boat and the land, which we periodically escape to as viewers whereas, once abandoned, we are almost exclusively alone with Daniel and Susan. Also, while the pacing and editing of Spielberg’s film is the culpable party in regards to tension, the predicament in Open Water, itself an all-too-plausible terror, needs little aesthetic reinforcement. (And, if this weren’t enough, live sharks were used in the filming).
This is not to imply that Kentis’s work doesn’t possess its own aesthetic merits. Approximately three-quarters of the way through the feature, during a night sequence, the director uses lightening to create an ominous strobe effect in order to issue one of the most unnerving scenes in all of horror: we catch only the briefest of glimpses of what lies beneath before the lights go out, leaving us helpless and only excruciatingly aware of the current stature of our situation.
Many critics have questioned the nudity during the first few minutes of the feature but, upon retrospection, one realizes that Kentis ingeniously inserted the sequence in order to establish that the couple is antagonistic to one another prior to being stranded. As such, the director posits a very Machiavellian residue for, only after Susan tempts Daniel with her body (after he impolitely forces her to wait to utilize the bathroom facet), does it register that what is to come will more than likely not be buffered by respect and humane understanding. It is with this in mind that, when we are presented with the couple merely bobbing up and down in the water, staring in opposing directions, do we came to understand that such is not merely the product of–much like a lengthy car ride–having run out of anything to say to one another.
The only serious problem with Open Water is that it candidly announces that it is based on true events. Kentis took the story of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were stranded in the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, and fictionalized it. As such, by the climax of Open Water, a logistic conundrum is created in that the work admits it is largely a product of conjecture and speculation. Kentis could have easily, either omitted the note in the opening, or revised the finale to make it consistent with its source material.
In lieu of it minor downfalls, Chris Kentis’s Open Water is one of the most psychologically devastating, effective works of horror ever made. Not only does it force its viewer to identify with its victims, but its does so largely due to is unabashed realism. Whereas a major Hollywood production would eliminate the mundane, such makes Open Water’s predicament almost too believable. If nothing else, Kentis’s work stands as a refreshing reminder that ingenuity and determination are the only prerequisites to make a great work of art.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
