Review: Something in the Water

Director:  Hayley Easton Street

Stars:  Nicole Rieko Setsuko, Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart, Hiftu Quasem

This June we’ve already suffered the monumental (and, alas, wearisome) stupidity of baffling Netflix hit Under Paris, but evidently we’re still nowhere near done with killer shark movies as here’s another one hot on its tail. Continuing StudioCanal’s year of largely lamentable acquisitions, there’s definitely something in the waters of Hayley Easton Street’s hen-do survival horror, but it certainly isn’t common sense, innovation or ingenuity.

Meg (Hiftu Quasem) arrives at an anonymous tropical paradise destination for her friend Lizzie’s (Lauren Lyle) wedding one year after being beaten senseless by a gang of homophobic youths provoked by her then-girlfriend Kayla (Natalie Mitson). Meg is still reliving the trauma of that night, so isn’t super-thrilled when her former squeeze is the one sent to meet her at the airport. Aware that their friends are made for each other, impulsive Cam (Nicole Rieko Setsuko) and level-headed Ruth (Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart) scheme to get the two talking by hiring a little rust-bucket and stranding them on a desert island together. Lizzie – who nobody knows can’t swim – comes along for the lols.

Well, joke’s on you, Lizzie, because there’s a fucking shark there, isn’t there. Once it’s taken a pretty good chunk out of Ruth’s calf, the quintet go into panic mode, and its around here that the rash decisions and frantic blunders start crashing into one another as though fighting for supremacy. Keeping all the phones in one bag doesn’t seem like the soundest start…

Something in the Water’s script seems to be both its biggest boon and its greatest weakness. With little new to bring to the table in terms of shark kills or stifling situations, scribe Cat Clarke fleshes things out with character material. The will-they won’t-they between Meg and Kayla re their possible reconciliation is played well enough to keep us interested. Far, far, far less engaging is Lizzie’s constant self-absorbed fretting over her sodding wedding. Lyle does relatively well with a deeply-unsympathetic character, successfully playing a person about as tolerable as a knife in the ear. Perhaps if Lizzie were a little more resourceful… But, no. We’re even denied the lascivious satisfaction of watching her get gnashed to pieces by the movie’s barely-seen shark. Reduced to scant metaphor, there’s no real sense of presence to the aquatic menace circling these young women.

Given the lengthy build-up, there’s little surprise who’s going to get to play Final Girl in this one. When it comes down to it, Something in the Water has too few ideas to compete with the more devilish likes of Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows. If there is something unique it brings to the survival thriller subgenre, its a lead heroine more sleepy than any previously encountered by this viewer. No judging. Treading water for 24 hours would take it out of me. But boy does Meg enjoy 40 winks…

It ticks over well-enough, I suppose. But, like its abominable brethren over on Netflix this month, Something in the Water also takes itself way too seriously. We’ve all had it up to here with the Syfy Channel brand of baby-brained novelty shark movies, but neither is anyone particularly braying for the kind of dryly exasperating material presently in the offering. Something nicely stupid like 47 Metres Down Uncaged wouldn’t go amiss now and then, but otherwise this is a subgenre that ought to die if there’re no better reason to keep swimming.

“Fear finds new depths” so sayeth the movie’s tagline. Something in the Water features two “that’s what she said” lines and a joke about wedding night anal. Depths indeed.