Saw Open Water, a shark-based horror movie. Shot on smeary digital film, it's a lo-fi/no-fi film, almost a mumblecore horror. The plot follows two young yuppies who go on a scuba-diving vacation, only to be left behind at sea due to an unfortunate counting accident. The sharks, fortunately, are not really the main antagonists. That honour is left to much more realistic elements of the cold ocean and the beating sun. The duo's attempts at survival are chillingly realistic, at first optimistic and talking eagerly of litigation but later ashen-faced and talking wistfully of surviving.
The film's use of cheap digital film is clever in that it looks a lot like family vacation video. The establishing shots of the ocean are generically beautiful, in the way tourism DVD videos are. There's a cruel third-act montage of tourists bovinely eating and wandering among picturesque fire-pits. This bucolic vision of exotic tropics is contrasted with the harsh, vast indifference of nature. The sharks, when they come, are not personified and do not seem evil. They seem Hertzog-ianly opportunistic, dumb, and bored.
An interesting movie, it lacks the punch to really be captivating but yields a lot of horrible situation for your investment. Little in the way of viscera but high in existential dread, it's sort of a thinking-person's horror. Not particularly horrifying, just horrible.
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