CinemaNow - Open Water

The $500,000 shark movie Open Water will be getting into the swim of things with the big-budget fright films Alien Vs. Predator and The Exorcist: The Beginning as it opens wide this weekend -- opens wide with teeth, that is. Critics are suggesting that the low-budget film packs far more scariness into its 80 minutes than the two other scary movies combined. (It's also the longest 80 minutes you ever may spend in a movie theater, comments Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle, adding, That's not because it's bad, but because it's good.) The movie, based on a true story about a couple who go scuba diving off a chartered boat and are left behind, left Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times with the need to go outside and walk in the sunshine and try to cheer myself up when it was over. Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News calls it effectively unnerving. The Wall Street Journal's Joanne Kaufman was clearly unnerved, writing, Open Water is so deeply terrifying, so primal in its depiction of man at the mercy of nature, that watching it shakes you to the core. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times that the film titillates us with the dread of (someone else's) exotic death, and teases us with the illusion that what we are watching is real. But Scott contends that it fails to make us care as much as we should about the fate of its heroes. On the other hand, Jan Stuart in Newsday argues that what makes the those heroes so interesting is that they are so stunningly uninteresting, like a couple in one of those black-and-white horror quickies from the 1950s, or Barbie and Ken dolls doing a Survivor-style TV stint. In that regard, Sid Smith in the Chicago Tribune produces the best line: The deep has never been so creepy, nor, in some ways, the creeps so deep. But Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times keeps his contrarian reputation intact with his review of the movie, in which he asks, Don't most people already know how indifferent the universe can be without having to sit through the suspenseful but increasingly unpleasant Open Water?