Underwater -- a review

I wasn’t expecting to love Underwater as much as I did. In fact, I was in no hurry to even see this movie at all were it not for the rave reviews for it from John Squires, editor of Bloody Disgusting, as well as reviewers from several other horror outlets. They championed Underwater so much that I rented it digitally, and I wound up loving it myself so much that I promptly bought a physical media copy of the film the day after seeing the rental.

Underwater deals with the crew of an undersea drilling rig--a massive, ringed city at the bottom of the Pacific that houses several hundred--that suffers a cataclysmic event in the opening few minutes of the film. Norah Price (wonderfully played by Kristen Stewart), is so caught off guard by the crushing devastation that it’s all that she can do to just run to the nearest safety zone barely in time without her shoes. Stewart, who proved her acting chops in such great films as Personal Shopper, is fantastic as the cynical Norah--a young woman who’s been short-changed in her life, who now finds herself fighting for survival in a submerged rig that’s falling apart around her.

But Underwater steadily ramps up the terror by at first subtly suggesting that whatever is destroying the underwater drilling platform is far more than just an earthquake. In tautly-directed scenes of intense horror, we slowly begin to see that the underwater drilling has unleashed these horrific aquatic creatures that are at first feeding on the dead humans in the deep, dark, depths. Yet once alerted to the presence of Norah and her fellow survivors, their onslaught intensifies, and things only get worse when it becomes clear that this army of creatures is just the tip of the Lovecraftian iceberg.

Director William Eubank (The Signal) delivers a lean, mean chiller that clocks in at just over 90 minutes (I watched the extended version). But he manages to ratchet up the suspense while still giving us some genuinely moving character moments, thanks to a good script and a great cast of actors, who also include Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, and Jessica Henwick. There’s even some wry commentary regarding the corporate mentality of overlooking people for profits. Underwater was a very pleasant surprise for me--a film with a great message that couldn’t have come at a better time: in these dark pandemic days, we need a reminder of how we need to persevere, as well as look out for each other, now more than ever. --SF

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