Mark Reviews Movies: INTO THE DEEP

Into the Deep, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

Just a little bit of suspicion would go a long way to preventing a lot of trouble in Into the Deep. David Beton's screenplay, of course, can't have any of that, lest the story here end before it even begins. That leaves us questioning far too much about the characters and their decisions in this one-location thriller.

The location is a sailboat, a personal yacht owned by a charming young man, whose charms and pleasant demeanor and good looks go a long way for Jess (Ella-Rae Smith). She is 22, lives with her father, works at a souvenir shop in the unspecified tourist town in some uncertain coast of the world where she lives, and is still haunted by the drowning death of her mother 11 years prior.

The movie opens with the mother's death (all of it heard and none of it scene), the daughter's continued grief, and the father's desire to move on with his life, and from there, it treats those details as the whole crux of Jess' character. She's annoyed that dad (played briefly by Andrew Steele) has a new girlfriend and that the relationship has become quite serious, so she's in a rebellious mood when she spots Ben (Matthew Daddario), an American tourist in this unknown part of the world, looking through the window of the shop where she works—just as she's trying to take off a novelty shirt and reveals her bra in the process.

She runs after him, mostly because her best friend and co-worker Emi (Mikkita Chadha) thinks he's kind of creepy but attractive enough for Jess chase down in the street. It's the kind of meet-cute that's definitely a meeting but not cute enough to serve as a solid foundation for how quickly things move for the plot to even exist. Jess invites Ben to a party at the beach that night, and after some local guy—apparently her jealous ex-boyfriend, although the character doesn't seem to have an existence beyond her traumatic past and the traumatic present she's eventually caught up in—punches Ben, she agrees to join him on his boat for some drinks.

That's the first bad decision here, especially since no one at home or at the party knows Ben or that Jess is going off alone with him, and the whole plot, then, hinges on just how disarming and charismatic and intrinsically safe Ben comes across in a matter of about five minutes of screen time. Daddario is at least those first two qualities in this performance. No matter how nice and polite and apologetic about some of his actions (such as the thing about staring at her through the window and a couple of other more dramatic choices later) as he may be, though, there's something either unbelievable or disconcerting about the sight of this stranger making Jess a drink, while she just sits there without a care or a worry about a guy with whom she has had about ten minutes of conversation.

The rest of the plot, really, depends on us being as unaware as our protagonist, who awakens the next morning to discover that Ben has sailed out to sea. He has an excuse, of course, and Jess buys it without considering her obvious objection to his action, just as she doesn't notice how Ben leers at and flirts with Lexie (Jessica Alexander), a woman who's unconscious on a jet ski that bumps into the boat. After some more drinking and waking up without much knowledge of what has happened, Jess finally starts to suspect that something is wrong here. She suspects Lexie, though, for some reason.

From there, the remainder of the plot of Into the Deep, which has Jess switching or pretending to alter her allegiances and suspicions until she has a clear answer about which of these two strangers she should trust (Even then, she doesn't have the conversation she should have with the other, simply because the screenplay tries to escalate conflict quickly and without much motivation), is even more unconvincing. Director Kate Cox gets some claustrophobic tension from the tight quarters of the boat and solid performances from the cast (which is something, considering how thinly and inconsistently written these characters are), but the whole of the story depends too much on Jess being overly naïve and then, for no real reason, overly paranoid about or protective of certain characters for it—or her for that matter—to be believable.

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