Mark Reviews Movies: THE REEF: STALKED

The Reef: Stalked, RLJE Films/Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 28, 2022

A group of friends finds themselves being hunted by a shark in The Reef: Stalked. That's an overly familiar setup, and that's just counting the work of writer/director Andrew Traucki, whose new movie about a quartet of people being pursued by a shark is an unconnected sequel to The Reef, which is about a quartet of people being pursued by a shark. That first movie almost worked, thanks to a tight and spare story, a real sense of helplessness, and the smart use of real shark footage. This one definitely doesn't.

To be fair to the filmmaker, he is trying a bit more with this follow-up, which hints that it might take place around the same time as the original movie—although that's the end of any kind of direct connection, beyond the fact that the basic outline of both stories are pretty much identical. This time, all of the main characters are women, and Traucki tries to make a pretty overt link between their fight for survival in the open water and trauma, as well as domestic violence.

That's the first mistake, if only because those good intentions of social awareness and messaging come across as slight, undermining, and almost exploitative within the context of a thriller/horror tale revolving around cheap, transparent scare tactics. Here, we first meet a group of four friends—three of whom will be part of the other quartet within the main story. Of most important note in the prologue are sisters Nic (Teressa Liane) and Cath (Bridget Burt), who are avid divers somewhere the near one of the Australian coasts.

After a day at sea with a couple friends, the two sisters head to their respective homes, where younger sister Annie (Saskia Archer) is currently living with Nic. Nic receives a text for help from Cath, but when she arrives at her sister's house, she finds the sister's husband sitting in shocked silence and Cath drowned—murdered by the man—in her bathtub.

None of this means anything practical to the story, except that Nic remains traumatized by her discovery and there's some tension between the surviving sisters. Both of those elements have little to do with the problem of domestic violence or the effects of trauma in any meaningful way, but they certainly do add some complications to a barebones plot.

Nine months after the murder, Nic has returned to Australia after some soul-searching and traveling for a reunion. Annie and the two friends—Jodie (Ann Truong) and Lisa (Kate Lister)—who were on that last diving expedition with Cath have arranged a weekend getaway for the group. It will consist of a lot of diving, but Nic can no longer look at water without re-living the horror of finding her dead sister and imagining the terrible way she died. Nobody in the movie actually talks about any of this, and while doing so certainly wouldn't fix all of the issues with this movie, it might have gone a considerable way towards seeing trauma as more than a gimmick.

Then again, a lack of communication turns out to be a huge problem for these characters, as their diving trip is interrupted by the sight of a dorsal fin—of a color and shape that doesn't match the shark that's supposedly attached to it—passing nearby. Each in a kayak, they all decide to return to the beach, but Annie, a relative newcomer to both the group and diving, lags a bit behind. She calls out to Lisa once after dropping her oar in the water, and for her own part, Lisa goes quite a distance without even thinking to look back if the least experienced member of the group is having problems—or is just near her at all.

Anyway, someone is killed by the shark, which is foreshadowed by the same footage of seagulls hovering around the water used repeatedly and portrayed by way of separate footage edited into the movie—in such a way that it too often looks as if it's completely separated from everything else. The plot has the survivors trying to get to a different island, in order to get help for a girl who's also attacked by the creature. Without much of a story here, Traucki uses a lot of suspenseful music (even before we know anything could be wrong), some obvious framing, several fake-outs, and a couple moments of an impact launching someone quite a ways in attempts to generate tension.

The performances of The Reef: Stalked are, for the most part, convincing in their terror and despair. As for the rest of the movie, it's generally not.

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