Mark Reviews Movies: UNDERWATER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 9, 2020

Underwater is a pretty derivative movie, wearing its inspirations on its sleeve—from its retro-futuristic production design, to its claustrophobic locales, to its gradual reveal of some deadly creature, to the fact that the protagonist deals with a monster while only in her underwear. One could critique this familiarity as some kind of inherent flaw in the movie, but what, really, would be the point?

It's better to learn and accept—and sooner, rather than later—that certain concepts and characters and styles and narrative beats are just part of the fabric of certain stories, especially ones such as this. The alternative is to be trapped looking for the influences of the past, potentially missing out on what the filmmakers are doing with their spin on familiar material.

This riff on a suspense/horror tale about a creature from a previously unknown world, for example, begins with such straightforward, cut-to-the-quick simplicity that it's quite admirable. No sooner have we met Norah (Kristen Stewart), a mechanical engineer working at the underwater command center for the largest drill in the world, than she is faced with a mysterious, catastrophic event.

Narrating some philosophical musings about time, Norah is interrupted by a leak in the ceiling. This is always a bad sign, and it's especially discouraging when thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean (In the intimidating opening shot, the camera begins in the darkness of the depths and pushes down, down, and farther down besides a massive, metallic pillar).

Suddenly, the walls of a hallway to Norah's side explode. She runs, starts pounding on the doors of the crew quarters, slides through the wet that quickly has pooled on the floor. She's joined by Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) in her dash to safety.

From a protective chamber, the two watch as other crew members rush toward them, and there's a sickening moment in which the entire hallway rises and falls, like a stomach-churning carnival ride. After the running men have been swallowed by the flood, Norah shuts the bulkhead.

The name of the game for director William Eubank is momentum, and it serves this material quite well in the initial rush. Ignoring any sort of exposition (save for what we might gather from information in the background of the opening credits), Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad's screenplay gets right to the business of disaster, survival, and obstacle upon obstacle preventing the characters from making any kind of easy escape.

The first duo encounter other survivors. There's Paul (T.J. Miller), the requisite and mostly unwelcome comic relief, who has been buried beneath some rubble. In the escape pod bay, there's Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel), determined to stay behind if it means saving his crew. In another room, the quartet meet up with Emily (Jessica Henwick), a research assistant, and Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), her boyfriend.

As one might expect, the goal here is for the survivors to escape the underwater station and reach the surface. In the way of that goal, naturally, there are plenty of problems, including faulty diving gear and mechanical failures and the minor issue of some killer creatures that have been unearthed by the drill.

Here's where Eubank's straight-to-the-point approach—with the point primarily being the action—gets in the way of the movie's rather modest ambitions. The plot simply puts forth one suspense sequence after another, which is pretty much an expected requisite of this sort of story.

The characters are underdeveloped (A couple are dealing with grief, although the specifics of those back stories aren't revealed until the third act), but because they don't matter, that doesn't matter. Additionally, there's the fact that Cassel, as the captain loyal to the safety of his crew, and Henwick, as a fearful newcomer learning that she's stronger than she thought, make strong-enough impressions, and Stewart, showing Norah's toughness and fear in the face of seemingly imminent death, is a resolute and sympathetic protagonist (The other characters aren't around or conscious long enough to make such an impression).

The rush to get from one setpiece to the next, though, leaves a gaping hole in our understanding of what's happening from each moment to the next. Eubank never establishes the layout of the facility, meaning that every new locale (a cargo elevator, the ocean floor, yet another drilling station, etc.) comes as a surprise and every goal is equally as vague. The editing here doesn't help, since it frequently jumps from one action beat to the next without any care for our understanding of how things and characters are spatially related to each other. On that front, the underwater scenes are so gloomy, with every character wearing an identically bulky diving suit, that it's too easy to lose our grasp of who's who, where, and doing what.

Some of this is queasily (Norah walking through the remains of her de-pressurized friend) or almost ludicrously (A character is swallowed whole by a creature, with the camera following the trip, and then there's a Lovecraft-ian reveal near the end) effective. Underwater, though, is an admirably simple thriller undone, not by its familiarity, but by a lack of basic craft.

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