Underwater – Review

underwater kristen stewart

Underwater

Directed by: William Eubank

Runtime: 95 minutes

Here’s a fun fact: thalassophobia is an intense and persistent fear of bodies of water that appear vast, dark, deep, and dangerous. And here’s another one: atychiphobia refers to experiencing a relentless fear of failure and disappointment. What do these two particular phobias have in common, you may ask? Ah, therein lies the rub; however, the release of sci-fi horror film Underwater goes a long way to providing such an answer.

As the film opens, we’re presented with some vague, future timeline where mega-corporations have begun to drill deep down into the ocean floor for energy resources. One such company, Tian Industries, has set up shop in the Marianas Trench, which—again, fun fact—is the deepest offshore trench in the real world, maxing out at a depth of over 10,000 metres in a valley known as the Challenger Deep. (For those playing at home, that’s deeper than if you flipped Mount Everest upside down and plopped it in the ocean, or roughly the size and depth of five Grand Canyons). Our story begins on Kepler Station 822, where mechanical engineer Norah Price (Kristen Stewart) is going through the motions, hanging out in her underwear and giving us a curious mix of characterisation that involves voice over, teeth cleaning, animal rescue and a good case of the shakes. Then, with only the briefest hint of ominous foreboding, an earthquake strikes the station, and shit immediately hits the fan. Thrust into peril with little warning or preparation, as bulkheads crumble and implode from the immense pressure above, Norah and her colleagues scramble to survive and escape imminent danger.

To their credit, director William Eubank (The Signal) and writers Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad do an admirable job of throwing the audience into the same chaos and turmoil as Norah and her crewmates. In a clear subversion of standard disaster-at-sea tropes, there’s no slow helicopter ride across the open ocean to set the scene, or the recruitment of a special team of experts to become the heroes later on and save the day. Shit gets very real, very quickly, and we’re left watching a group of seemingly normal people struggle to get out of it. Exposition is delivered through a newspaper clip reel montage ripped straight from Godzilla (2014), and Eubank gets straight down to business with concussive explosions and his trademark hard-on for slow-motion shots within the first five minutes. Subtle Underwater is not, but the film does benefit from this relentless pacing and an intense sense of forward momentum, managing to hit a variety of narrative beats and set-pieces, all in a lean 95-minute runtime.

When our group of survivors decide that the only way to reach the escape pods is to walk for several miles across the ocean floor in nothing but pressure rigged diving suits, things take a turn for the weird and scary, with monsters of the eldritch, Lovecraftian kind dispatching group members one by one. It’s here that Underwater’s debt to other, more interesting films becomes obvious, mixing a sense of claustrophobia and impending doom from The Abyss (1989) and Sphere (1998), with the sinister survival horror of Alien (1979) and Event Horizon (1997). Stewart does an excellent job of paralleling a Ripley-type character in the role of Norah, making her portrayal feel like the plucky protagonist of a survival RPG, constantly fixing/hacking terminals, assessing level maps, configuring weapons and rescuing fellow crewmates. (Hollywood, if you’re reading this, quit with the endless cavalcade of reboots and remakes already, and give us a bloody Bioshock or Dead Space film.)

Eubank’s direction alternates between graceful establishing shots of the ocean floor installations, providing a welcome sense of scene geography, and suffocating helmet close-ups to maximise terror. Meanwhile, Bojan Bazelli’s dimly lit cinematography and Naaman Marshall’s grim, industrial production design mean that everything about the film’s exteriors, props and worldbuilding feels real and incredibly lived-in. For a film that spends at least half of its runtime in murky water and near-perpetual darkness, it’s still beautiful to watch.

All of this leads us to question the untimely release of Underwater. Principal photography for the film finished in mid-2017, yet—due to Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and its subsequent film properties (*cough*, The New Mutants, *cough*)—the film’s release was delayed and pushed back until now, landing in the brusque January dumping ground of 2020. One reason for this baffling decision might be the presence of T.J. Miller as one of Norah’s hapless crew members, who was still riding off his D-grade Ryan Reynolds schtick well into 2017 before sexual assault allegations reared their head as part of the #MeToo movement.

These concerns aside, Underwater is still a competent, engaging, albeit derivative, film that manages to do quite a lot with a conservative budget and sharp script. The film’s ending does leave open the possibility of additional tie-ins to flesh out the world and any of those dire implications (if you believe the Internet rumours, it’s ‘apparently’ part of the nebulous Cloverfield cinematic universe, for whatever that’s worth). However, backed by Stewart’s robust performance and a decent amount of shocks and thrills, Underwater feels much stronger as a standalone human (mis)-adventure. As Lovecraft himself wrote: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

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