Deep Water is in cinemas now — a throwback disaster-horror spectacular that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t apologise for a single blood-soaked second
There is a specific and increasingly rare pleasure to be found in a film that knows precisely what it is, commits entirely to that thing, and dares you to have a bad time. Deep Water, which opened in cinemas on May 1 and is still playing now, is that film. It is a plane crash movie and a shark movie in one. It is produced by Gene Simmons of KISS. It is directed by Renny Harlin. You already know whether you’re buying a ticket.
For the uninitiated: Harlin is the Finnish filmmaker who gave the world Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and — crucially, most relevantly — the 1999 sharksploitation classic Deep Blue Sea, a film so gleefully insane it ends with LL Cool J escaping a genetically engineered super-shark by hiding inside an oven. Deep Water isn’t quite that deranged, and for a few of its detractors that’s the problem. For the rest of us, it’s a tremendously satisfying piece of old-school genre cinema that earns its bloodshed through sheer commitment to craft.
The premise is unapologetically stripped back. A packed commercial flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai crashes into the middle of the Pacific Ocean after an onboard lithium battery causes a catastrophic malfunction. Among the survivors are Ben (Aaron Eckhart), the quietly heroic first officer with personal baggage he’s been running from; Rich (Ben Kingsley), the seasoned captain rendered immediately helpless by the impact; and a cross-section of passengers who range from believably terrified to enjoyably insufferable. The dead bodies in the water attract mako sharks. What follows is approximately 106 minutes of gnarly, bloody, intermittently brilliant genre cinema.
The crash sequence alone is worth the price of admission. Harlin’s direction here is genuinely exceptional — air tanks ripping through the fuselage, overhead luggage becoming lethal projectiles, engines exploding in sequence as the plane skids across a coral reef. It is furiously edited, precisely staged, and lands with a physical weight that pins you to your seat. This is what Harlin does when he is operating at full throttle, and for this sequence at least, he absolutely is. The film never quite reaches those heights again, but it doesn’t need to. The crash sets a bar of pure visceral energy, and the survival sequences — claustrophobic, waterlogged, populated by hungry CGI sharks with a refreshingly voracious work ethic — keep pace well enough.
Eckhart is the engine the film runs on. There are comparisons to be made to his performance in Sully — the quietly competent American authority figure, ground down by circumstance, stepping up when it matters — and Harlin leans into them without apology. Where the script, credited to no fewer than six writers, occasionally produces dialogue that clunks like wreckage hitting the ocean floor, Eckhart’s grounded, headstrong presence papers over the cracks. Kingsley, by contrast, is given little to do before the film efficiently removes him from the equation, which is both a relief and a mild waste. The supporting ensemble — including an obnoxious drunken athlete type who the film enthusiastically punishes for being himself — hits the disaster movie archetypes with the reliability of a checklist, and that’s not a criticism. These are the rules of the genre, and Deep Water plays by them with genuine affection.
What the film lacks — and what Deep Blue Sea had in abundance — is a willingness to go fully, knowingly absurd. Harlin plays the shark sequences with relative seriousness, aiming for sustained dread rather than the winking, campy escalation that made its predecessor a cult favourite. The result is a film that sometimes sits in an uncertain middle ground between genuine tension and spectacular excess. The CGI sharks are credible enough to unsettle but never quite terrifying enough to linger. The human drama is functional but rarely rises above its archetypal limitations. Critics are split almost exactly down the middle — 72% on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels right — between those who read it as a minor disappointment from a director who could have cut loose more, and those who recognise it as precisely the kind of mid-budget genre spectacle that simply doesn’t get made anymore.
The latter camp has the stronger argument. Deep Water is not Jaws. It is not even Deep Blue Sea. But it is confident, well-executed, viscerally satisfying popcorn horror-thriller from a craftsman who knows his way around a set piece. In a cinematic landscape where studio horror has become increasingly risk-averse and reliant on IP, a film this straightforwardly committed to the proposition of sharks eating people in an ocean feels almost radical. The production, shepherded by Magenta Light Studios after years of development with Arclight Films and Gene Simmons’ production banner, was shot across Gran Canaria and New Zealand, and the locations give the film a scope that its mid-budget origins don’t always suggest.
It is not a perfect film. It is, however, exactly the kind of film that deserves to be seen in a cinema, on a large screen, ideally next to someone who screams at sharks.
The ocean has always been there. The sharks have always been waiting. You just weren’t paying attention.
Dark Frights Verdict: Renny Harlin returns to shark-infested waters and delivers a bloody, technically assured, unashamedly old-fashioned disaster-horror with a crash sequence for the ages. Imperfect, but enormously fun.