by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Hermoine Corfield, Jacob Junior Nayinggul, Arthur Angel, Jake Ryan, Josh McConville
Intro:
... that rare modern shark movie that actually merits watching.
Novel ideas for shark movies are rarer than yowies. We’re not talking about cheap marketing gimmicks to try and make them look like more than the usual (the obnoxious virality of Sharknado, the superficial big budget of Meg and Meg 2: The Trench), but actual creativity in how to present man vs. shark in a fresh way. The latest from Aussie filmmaker Matthew Holmes (The Legend of Ben Hall, The Cost), however, has genuinely decent ideas, which bulk it up into a solid creature feature.
Once again wielding his fascination with period Australiana, Holmes interbreeds two of the nation’s biggest cultural hallmarks (true crime and wildlife that scares off visitors) to create a scenario laden with anxiety. A deep-sea diving team – Hermoine Corfield’s Clara, Jacob Junior Nayinggul’s Jimmy, and Arthur Angel’s Ernie – is hired by hard-arse gangster Bull Maddock (Jake Ryan putting on his Wyrmwood: Apocalypse villain stripes again) to recover a car full of stolen booty from the bottom of a river.
Like all shark movies, it takes artistic cues from the perennial Jaws, but in ways that make sense, like the minimal screen time for the aquatic threat, along with the reliance on (superb) practical effects both for the shark and the underwater scenes overall. You can almost imagine oceanographer and part-time filmmaker James Cameron looking at the efficacy of the dry-for-wet filmmaking here, and wondering if he could’ve saved dozens of millions of dollars.
Even Josh McConville’s cartoonish Eastern Bloc accent as Bull’s lackey Janusz gives the main dynamic a certain Raiders energy.
There are hints of deeper meaning to be gleamed every so often, bringing up questions of who is ‘worthy’ to die for someone else’s gain, between the perpetually condescended-to Clara and the racially-discriminated Jimmy. But while that thickens the sauce somewhat, this is ultimately all about the tension in the moment, and every moment counts here. The period detail combined with the grounding of the threats both within and without (death by sharpened teeth, death by gunshot, prolonged death by lack of financial access), along with Angela Little’s string sections and Sue Schweikert and Matt Villa’s shark-tooth editing chops, create an atmosphere of intensive believability that squeezes the most out of the danger on-screen.
Fear Below is that rare modern shark movie that actually merits watching. Its period setting and rural background give it some nice local flavour, and it uses them to raise interesting questions integral to the survival genre, but Holmes and company deserve bonus credit for how well they do the fundamentals of the premise. Without overly flashy special effects, or a needlessly overbooked cast, they reconnect with the innate fear of the watery unknown, even when confined to an offshoot of the Macintyre River.