Shot on digital video with a pair of unknown actors (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) who tread water for most of the film's brisk 79-minute running time,
Open Water is a fact-based exercise in primal fear that will scare the socks off anyone who dreads death from the deep, but it's familiar stuff if you've ever watched "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel (which is mentioned in writer-director Chris Kentis's economical screenplay). If you can't accept that a trendy young couple could be accidentally abandoned during an open-sea diving excursion (but hey, it really happened!), then you'll surely be hooked by the intense what's-gonna-happen anxiety that escalates when the horrified vacationers realize they've got unwanted company. It's too easy to call
Open Water a poor man's
Jaws, and the movie's too realistically frightening to be compared to the popcorn thrills of
Deep Blue Sea, so what you've got here is a shark movie that creates its own little low-budget niche. Before placing his actors in actual proximity to sharks, Kentis betrays them with some silly, bickering dialogue, but with adequate realism in its favor,
Open Water offers a perfect excuse to stay on the beach.
--Jeff Shannon
