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less charming and more strange than your average blog
June 03, 2004
SIFF / Open Water / ***
Being stranded out in the open ocean has always been one of my biggest fears. Not in the sense that I ever imagined it would actually happen to me, but one of those "WOULDN'T THAT BE THE SCARIEST THING EVER?" situations. It's one of those childhood nightmares that I never really got over, like being buried alive or those damned Alien movies. (Just the opening image on the official site makes me a little nervous!)
So you can imagine my reaction to Open Water, a new film which plays out this terrifying scenario with excruciating detail and suspense. Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan) are a yuppie couple (the kind who like to talk on multiple cel phones at once) taking their first vacation in ages to a resort somewhere in the tropics. After an erroneous headcount on a local diving tour, the pair return to the surface to find their tour boat gone and no land in sight. That sound you hear? It's my heart pounding. And that's before the sharks show up.
Open Water famously scared the poop out of everyone at Sundance, and it's easy to see why. As Daniel and Susan progress from annoyed to nervous to alarmed to irritable to frantic to terrified and worse, the film is merciless and unsentimental. Like the similar Blair Witch Project (a comparison I'm sure the filmmakers are tired of), Open Water doesn't rely on a collection of BOO!-type scares to get you on the edge of your seat, but instead takes its time building suspense that pays off in a climax that will make you shudder. The real horror is in what you don't see.
Open Water clocks in at a brisk 79 minutes, which fits the simplicity of the structure nicely. It was obviously shot on a shoestring budget, although, with a cast of two and a set consisting of "the freakin' ocean," it doesn't show all that often except in the digital image quality. The pixellation (and the occasional awkward line-reading) are forgiven, especially since this is such a labor of love for writer-director-editor Chris Kentis (whose wife produced the film), who revealed in a Q&A after the screening that the budget was only $130,000.
These days, you don't find many scary movies that stay with you after the closing credits. This little nail-biter is sure to be a big success when it's released in theaters this August. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies...
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So you can imagine my reaction to Open Water, a new film which plays out this terrifying scenario with excruciating detail and suspense. Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan) are a yuppie couple (the kind who like to talk on multiple cel phones at once) taking their first vacation in ages to a resort somewhere in the tropics. After an erroneous headcount on a local diving tour, the pair return to the surface to find their tour boat gone and no land in sight. That sound you hear? It's my heart pounding. And that's before the sharks show up.
Open Water famously scared the poop out of everyone at Sundance, and it's easy to see why. As Daniel and Susan progress from annoyed to nervous to alarmed to irritable to frantic to terrified and worse, the film is merciless and unsentimental. Like the similar Blair Witch Project (a comparison I'm sure the filmmakers are tired of), Open Water doesn't rely on a collection of BOO!-type scares to get you on the edge of your seat, but instead takes its time building suspense that pays off in a climax that will make you shudder. The real horror is in what you don't see.
Open Water clocks in at a brisk 79 minutes, which fits the simplicity of the structure nicely. It was obviously shot on a shoestring budget, although, with a cast of two and a set consisting of "the freakin' ocean," it doesn't show all that often except in the digital image quality. The pixellation (and the occasional awkward line-reading) are forgiven, especially since this is such a labor of love for writer-director-editor Chris Kentis (whose wife produced the film), who revealed in a Q&A after the screening that the budget was only $130,000.
These days, you don't find many scary movies that stay with you after the closing credits. This little nail-biter is sure to be a big success when it's released in theaters this August. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies...
