Netflix And Chill: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

I like sharks. They terrify me, and I want to look away, but I also have great respect for them as predators who are very close to the top of the food chain in their main environment. I used to read up on them, and various aquatic creatures, when I was a kid with the time to spend on special projects and absorbing factoids like some info-hungry sponge.

I cannot remember all of those facts here and now, and I won't use Google to make myself seem smarter, but I do remember that a) a shark can sense one drop of blood in a large body of water from quite some distance, and b) they can also sense the small electric fields given off by animals. They're pretty canny when it comes to finding "food".

So the fact that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged wants you to believe that a bunch of panicking teens could stay still, whimpering, while trying to avoid a large, blind shark is just one of the many preposterous elements that made it impossible to ever take seriously. I'll try to mention some other ridiculous highlights below.

Scheduled to go off on a boat ride, Mia (Sophie Nèlisse) and her stepsister, Sasha (Corinne Foxx) are instead persuaded to go off with Sasha's friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone), to dive and explore an underwater city. It's an area that is being explored by Mia's father (played by John Corbett) and his team, although they will be at a different part of the site while the girls sneak in to have their underwater fun. And eventually they are all surprised by the giant, blind, shark. The appearance of the beast is so surprising that one of the young, thin, teenage girls pushes back in the water so far that she hits a stone pillar . . . so hard that it is knocked over, blocking the way that they entered the sunken city. Because that is entirely plausible.

I like director Johannes Roberts. He has spent the past couple of decades working with various budgets and resources to supply a mixed bag of genre thrills. Highlights include the superb, and too rarely mentioned by horror fans, F AKA The Expelled, the film preceding this one, and The Strangers: Prey At Night. But I'll even stand by some of his films that could be viewed as lesser efforts. The Other Side Of The Door at least tried a couple of different things among the more familiar beats, and Storage 24 simply aims to be an entertaining, low-budget, British sci-fi horror. He even manages a couple of good moments here, one or two set-pieces that still entertain in between the stupidity, and the final sequence is just the right kind of silly to prove a satisfying conclusion.

It's as a writer that he seems to have slipped most, once again working with Ernest Riera on this. You can either go for gritty realism and tension or complete absurdity, but trying to land between the two rarely works. Most people will start wondering how they are supposed to take this film when the girls all put on scuba masks, nothing covering their ears, and then are all able to talk clearly to one another once underwater. Maybe the masks were designed to work in the same was as bone-conducting headphones, I cannot swear that there aren't any out there that don't work in that way, but it just didn't seem at all likely. Then the blind shark appears. Then you get that pillar knocked over. And things just keep getting sillier and sillier, for the most part. It would be more endearing if you didn't suspect that there could have been the chance here for another properly good underwater horror from Roberts.

The main actresses don't do a bad job. They are all required to swim around and look frightened, and they do that well enough. There's the strained relationship between the stepsisters, you get the one person delivering all of the information to the group (and viewers), and there's a great moment that has the classic freak out by someone who then tries something incredibly selfish. Make the rest of the plotting more believable and the cast would come out of it all a lot better. Corbett also does a decent job, and also provides some info at just the right time.

It's laughable in what it wants you to believe, a film that assumes everyone will be able to switch their brains off for the duration, and tests that notion to the limits, but if you CAN at least switch your brain off for some of the runtime then you also get some decent death scenes, and some crude jump scares that will provide a distraction for 90 minutes.

4/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.

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