Open Water
August 19, 2004; Regal Falmouth #3
* * * ¾ (out of 4)

I don’t scare easily, especially not in movies. I guess I’ve seen enough horror movies that the “conventional” stuff really doesn’t touch me anymore. I’ve seen my fill of grotesque monsters and gruesome murders, and random over-built jump moments (à la The Village) tend to make me laugh more than jump. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t shaking coming home from this movie. I haven’t been this scared since I watched Session 9 by myself in a dark room.

Overworked and overstressed, American couple Dan and Sue finally take a break from both their demanding jobs to go on vacation. It’s very obvious from the start that they need the time off, since neither one can put down their cell phone long enough to say hello to the other at the film’s start. Once they arrive in their undisclosed tropical location, they register for a scuba diving trip for the next morning. After 35 minutes of diving, a simple, honest mistake by the boat’s crew leads to Dan and Sue being left behind as the boat heads back for land. Dan and Sue spend the next twenty-four hours (and the remainder of the movie) without food, water, warmth, or rescue, floating in the ocean with no means of escape.

Writer/director Chris Kentis has an ideal what-if scenario here. It’s real, it’s terrifying, and it has happened before. What he presents is a horror movie that drives on real primal fear; not the fear that some sadistic psycho is going to jump out of a closet to cut you up with a chainsaw, but the ear that maybe we humans aren’t as dominant and powerful as we like to think we are. He gives us two people – real people, with no stereotypic characteristics – who get caught in a bad situation, and he shows what happens, from their perspective. In this way, his directing is incredible. Whatever Dan and Sue can’t see, for the most part the audience can’t see either. It plays perfectly on this fear of the unknown, so that when the audience finally sees what is around the couple, it’s just as nerve-wracking for the viewer as it is for the two onscreen.

People have and will complain about a few things. The movie was shot entirely with handheld cameras, but it fits in nicely with the couple on vacation. Even after they’ve been adrift for hours, the shooting style maintains a feeling that this could happen to anyone; there are no Hollywood touch-ups here. The only issue I had might be the script. The dialogue is a bit rough at times, and that is split evenly between the writing and the delivery. Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis aren’t as believable as a couple as I would have liked them to be in the early goings; this improves once the mortal danger kicks in. Neither of them have had a major film role before, and I imagine that it’s a hard transition to jump to effectively being the only two principles in a movie with little to no big-screen experience to draw from.

But the acting’s almost a moot point. Kentis presses all the right buttons here at all the right times. Some will claim that the movie gets boring in between “encounters,” but that emptiness is also relevant to understanding the characters, considering they spend a full day floating in the middle of nowhere.

More than anything else, I commend Kentis and Lion’s Gate for the ending. I should have seen it coming, but it’s the ending that no major Hollywood studio ever would have allowed. It’s risky, but it worked perfectly, and I left the theater in awe, remembering why I want to be in this business.

See this movie. It is the most mortally terrifying movie I have seen in a very, very long time.