There were two movie posters widely used for Open Water, the low-budget survival thriller that swam into theaters 20 years ago today. The more sensational of the two featured the film’s stars, Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis, bobbing in the water near the background of the frame. In the foreground — overshadowing them, nearly blotting out the whole image — is a large dorsal fin. This is what you could call the standard protocol for selling a movie about aquatic maneaters. When not simply ripping off the iconic open maw of the Jaws poster, the offspring of that seminal blockbuster use the ominous triangle on the beast’s back as design bait. It’s the visual equivalent of shouting “Shark!”
The other poster for Open Water is more suggestive — and, consequently, much closer in spirit to the film it advertises. There are no sharks visible in this artwork. Instead, the image pulls further out from the couple into a stark wide shot, emphasizing the vast, unforgiving sprawl of the ocean around them. Surrounded by water, puny under a canopy of storm clouds, the two look truly alone. And much more than the predators circling below the waves, it’s that sense of helpless isolation that gives this stripped-to-the-bone Jaws descendant its bite.
What Open Water has that many other shark movies don’t is a chill of plausibility. It’s an unsettlingly believable nightmare that plunks you down in the drink with its characters. That the film is based on a true story only tightens the clench of its realism. In 1998, a couple was accidentally left behind during a diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef; this historic screwup and the subsequent search reshaped safety protocols in the Queensland scuba industry. Open Water changes the names and the location — it’s set in the Caribbean, not Australia — but stays true to the events that inspired it, while credibly speculating on what may have happened out there after the boat pulled away without two of its passengers.
The opening scenes introduce us to Susan (Ryan) and Daniel (Travis), workaholic young professionals taking a much-needed, hastily planned tropical vacation. Writer-director Chris Kentis identifies stress lines in their twentysomething bliss, like Daniel’s failed attempts to put Susan in the mood the night before their ill-fated scuba excursion. These moments lay a bedrock of conflict — or, rather, conflict avoidance — that the movie will exploit once the two are stranded at sea. Looked at one way, Open Water is a drama about a relationship that’s been coasting for a while and the moment that it hits some very choppy waters.
How the two get abandoned is all too convincing. It hinges on another diver’s gear screwup, a simple head count mistake, and Daniel’s insistence that they do their own thing and break away a little from the group. Maybe 20 minutes into the movie, the two emerge from the depths to find that the boat (and land) is nowhere in sight. They’ve been left behind. And as the hours tick by, their illusion that everything will be OK— that they’re merely experiencing an epic inconvenience — slowly deflates.
Shot for as little as $120,000 and screened to raves at the Sundance Film Festival, Open Water is essentially the Blair Witch Project of fin flicks. Kentis, who identifies as a scuba enthusiast in real life, doesn’t adopt a found-footage framework or anything. But he does shoot the film on unglamorous, early-2000s digital video that enhances its sense of docurealism — that scraggly vérité quality that can erase the invisible distance between an audience and the events they’re watching. There’s certainly something distinctly Blair Witch about ordinary people lost in the middle of nowhere, bickering and panicking and trying to keep their wits about them as the sobering reality of their circumstances sets in.
Most of the movie is a two-hander. It could arguably work on the stage, provided that stage was a swimming pool. Besides the occasional (and arguably unnecessary) cutaway shot to dry land, we’re just out in the ocean with these two characters, floating without recourse as their patience wanes, their appetites grow, and sunlight fades. There’s a fair amount of dry humor in their reactions: “I wanted to go skiing!” Susan snaps during a late spat. As an acting exercise, Open Water is deceptively ambitious. The movie’s fear factor rests on how Ryan and Travis navigate the emotional shifts of this worst-case scenario.
The film’s arc is two level-headed people realizing, over the course of a day, just how monumentally screwed they are. Like terminal patients experiencing the stages of grief, they cling to the buoy of denial, convincing themselves that the boat will be back any minute, that this is just a story they’ll get to tell their friends later. Early on, they drop their leg weights, joking that the company wouldn’t dare try to charge them for them, as if that were the biggest thing they ultimately have to worry about. Their irritation eventually cracks into anger and then into fear. They’ve put their trust in fail-safes and guardrails that don’t exist.
As for the star attractions, they’re on the periphery, until they aren’t. In another play for realism, Kentis used actual sharks instead of animatronics or CGI. They are not the hulking leviathans we’ve come to expect in the aftermath of Jaws. They look and behave like real animals, splashing around erratically, their attacks arriving without warning or dun-dun foreshadowing. There’s one spectacularly creepy money shot late in the film asthe camera dips below the frame line of the water to catch a quick glimpse of a whole school of them darting around their easy targets. It’s a great metaphor for how Susan and Dan process the danger of their situation — the awful truth lurking just out of sight.
But if you went into Open Water expecting a full-blown creature feature, you might leave gnashing your own teeth. The sharks are a borderline abstract threat, a monster rarely seen. Jaws, long celebrated for keeping the big guy out of sight for long stretches (a genius solution to a malfunctioning special effect), is much heavier on shark action. Much gorier, too. As a result, Open Water proved about as divisive as Blair Witch, earning mostly positive reviews while royally ticking off those not keen to watch a couple of unknown actors float and argue for 80 minutes. (At the Chainsaw Awards, Fangoria Magazine’s annual reader poll, Open Water was nominated for best and worst horror movie of the year.)
Still, the film pushes beyond mere galeophobia. At its best, it gets you pondering what you would do in the fins of the characters. Or what you even could do. It’s rare to see a thriller built on existential helplessness. Susan and Daniel are almost literal sitting ducks, so vulnerable that they can’t even plant their feet. You could say that the film preys on a primordial fear of the water, but there’s another fear lurking deeper still, like those dead-eyed eating machines. Open Water says that the world is not as safety-proofed as you thought. The worst can happen, sometimes it will, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will come to save you. That’s a hell of a lot scarier than a fish of any size or appetite.
Open Water is currently streaming on Max. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
