Review: Underwater Plunges Audiences into a Tension-Free Void

The film doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.

Underwater
Photo: 20th Century Fox

William Eubank’s Underwater is neither a too-big-to-fail event film nor a relatively low-budget genre sleeper. In other words, it doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.

As computer expert Norah Price, one of a team of researchers working on a state-of-the-art laboratory at the bottom of the ocean, Kristen Stewart is hobbled by a surfeit of expositional dialogue and tech jargon yet somehow manages to convey Norah’s vulnerability and tenacity through the melancholic perseverance that the actress embodies in even her worst movies. Sporting a shaved head, Stewart recalls Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in David Fincher’s Alien 3, but also Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, her pained reaction shots to various tragedies and horrors conveying far more than the tepid voiceover that this sci-fi-horror hybrid uses to communicate Norah’s romantic heartbreak.

Needless to say, Underwater’s premise is closer to that of Alien than The Passion of Joan of Arc, even if it dispenses with much of the character development and build-up that made Ridley Scott’s 1979 film so legendarily dread-inducing. Barely five minutes of setup transpire before a catastrophic accident cripples the research facility, and the remainder of Underwater simply charts the coordinated effort of six survivors to make it out alive, albeit through the menace of a hoard of killer sea monsters. With the exception of Stewart’s Norah, these survivors are each defined by a lone trait: the stolid captain (Vincent Cassel), the lovestruck scientists (John Gallagher Jr. and Jessica Henwick), the ever-frightened engineer (Mamoudou Athie), and the perpetual wiseacre (T.J. Miller) with the distinct personality of T.J. Miller.

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Production design and practical effects rule the day in Underwater. The research facility is given an unnervingly florescent-lit dinginess that makes its claustrophobic dimensions and rickety architecture palpable, while various scientific paraphernalia, including the bulky deep-diving suits the crew must don in order to walk across the ocean floor, look less like costumes or props than faulty, lived-in gear. Indeed, more terrifying than the sea monsters in Underwater is the threat of implosion, and the film provides a quite visceral sense of the unbearable effects of water pressure in the ocean’s depths. The underwater photography is dark and foreboding, but it also makes the ocean appear like the obvious habitat of the monsters, whose creepy translucence blends in seamlessly with the aquatic environment.

Unfortunately, much of the film is undone by a script that proves that certain horror and sci-fi clichés will never die. When the station’s infrastructure begins to collapse, one of the characters responds to the calamity with that old standby of nonsensical movie dialogue: “That’s impossible!” And it’s no spoiler to say that the one minority crew member inevitably dies first. But worst of all is the canned sense of horror, as every jump-scare is so predictable; no surprises exist in the action, nor any originality of purpose or execution in the story.

If the film is so lacking in suspense, it’s because Eubank rushes through scenes and blankets them in wall-to-wall dialogue instead of using long stretches of silence to emphasize the deep ocean’s tense, eerie ambience. Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts’s echoey electronic score helps to pick up the mood, but most scenes fail to evoke a nightmarish discomfort. Toward the end of Underwater, Norah and her remaining mates make their way to the station with the monsters looming nearby, but Eubank makes the trek an occasion for the kind of character-building dialogue he was too impatient to place at the beginning of the film. As such, instead of intensifying Norah and company’s dire situation, Eubank renders it innocuous.

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Score: 
 Cast: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, John Gallagher Jr., Jessica Henwick, Mamoudou Athie, T.J. Miller  Director: William Eubank  Screenwriter: Brian Duffield, Adam Cozad  Distributor: 20th Century Fox  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Michael Joshua Rowin

Michael Joshua Rowin is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Queens, New York. His writing has appeared in The Notebook, Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and other publications.

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