Something in the Water (2024)
Directed by: Hayley Easton Street
Premise: A group of female friends travels to an isolated island for a wedding. They become stranded in the ocean and are stalked by a tiger shark.
What Works: Once Something in the Water gets going it is an effective shark thriller. A group of friends are thrust into a life and death situation and when they are in peril the movie hits in an immediate and visceral way. Filmmaker Hayley Easton Street stages scenes in ways that draw out the tension. Once the women become stranded in the ocean the camera is frequently set at the water level with the waves lapping up against the camera. The camera placement creates a sense drowning. There are some effective uses of sound and Something in the Water frequently looks beautiful. There is a night scene that is hauntingly lit. The group of women are likable and convincing as a clique. They have a natural banter. Lauren Lyle is the bride-to-be and she plays her character with a comical self-absorption that the other women find obnoxious. When characters die there is a palpable sense of loss.
What Doesn’t: Something in the Water takes a while to get going. The picture only runs eighty-six minutes and it takes about twenty minutes before it finally gets to the shark attack. The opening is intended to set up the relationships between the women and it does that but we don’t get much in the way of depth. Most of the women are affable but there’s not much to them or to the film. This traumatic experience doesn’t bring them closer together or allow them to work out tensions in the friend group. The shark effects vary. The images of dorsal fins cutting through the water are done convincingly but the full reveal of the shark sometimes looks cartoonish. The premise of Something in the Water is very familiar. Open Water was released twenty years ago and The Reef was released fourteen years ago and since then the shark genre has pivoted into the same shipwreck scenario. It isn’t just the shark content that’s the same. So many of these films open with a trauma unrelated to the ocean. Something in the Water begins with a homophobic attack against two of these women and then skips ahead a year to the shark encounter. It’s a startling opener but the street attack and its repercussions aren’t meaningfully worked out in the rest of the story.
Disc extras: Available on Hulu.
Bottom Line: Something in the Water is an average shark thriller. It’s competently done. This is the feature directorial debut of Hayley Easton Street and she’s a promising filmmaker. But this movie also feels very familiar and it’s nowhere near as unsettling as Open Water or The Reef.
Episode: #1013 (September 15, 2024)