j* movie reviews 2020

Underwater (2020)

Survivalist terror in the deep, deep sea.

I don't mind horror, but I love survivalist terror. Those films that lean towards a wild ride of intensifying danger. And this starts with a bang, a decompression, and just continues on from there. There are obscure undersea beasts, all the danger of space but with greater pressurised risks of implosion, jellyfish, drilling the earth parables.

For the first little bit we collect our rag-tag crew. And then for the next section we watch them, in traditional horror style, get knocked off one by one. Kirsten Stewart absolutely rocks her Chemical Engineer with a good side dose of techy knowledge. There are really intriguing sections where she's just walking around in her underwear for a while, and it feels sort of liberated and cool rather than exploitive. I mean she has to do it for roughly legit deep-sea suit reasons. But holy hell, where did she get that bra? Because I spent a lot of time being envious about the comfy width of the straps and I'll have to find one.

There are notes of Alien, notes of Pitch Black, obviously as an undersea thing there is a lot of the vibe of Sphere, although possibly a little less mental, and some of the Deep Blue Sea sensations. This is a ride of a film though, there is always something exploding or imploding or cracking or breaking or attacking or alerting.

It's not exactly a complex plot or a super though provoking kind of film. But it does what it does really well. Survival deep, deep under the inky black sea.

J* gives it 4 stars.