47 Metres Down

Sur­round­ed by sharks in a rusty cage sus­pend­ed by the shadi­est boat that still floats… what could go wrong? Well, pret­ty much every­thing in 2017’s answer to The Shal­lows. And hon­est­ly, it’s a ter­ror-filled blast, even if the hor­ror genre’s plague of peo­ple mak­ing awful deci­sions runs ram­pant throughout.

Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are sis­ters liv­ing it up in the Mex­i­can sun after the former’s part­ner leaves her for being too ​“bor­ing”. Climb­ing into an obvi­ous­ly dan­ger­ous cage and get­ting low­ered into shark-infest­ed waters is clear­ly the best way to prove him wrong, right? ​“Think of the pic­tures!” Kate argues to Lisa’s dis­may. All is well at first, but soon the boat’s crane breaks and drops the pair 47 metres down to the bot­tom of the ocean. And then come the sharks.

Let’s get the neg­a­tives out of the way: the act­ing is flat, the dia­logue is forced, and there are cer­tain scenes where it feels like direc­tor Johannes Roberts for­got to shout the word ​‘cut’. But real­ly, who cares? It’s a shark thriller. It enter­tains and achieves its goal of mak­ing you ques­tion whether it’s safe to get back into the water. Job well and tru­ly done.

Gen­uine ten­sion is built from the moment the women enter the water right up to the very last shot of the film. Roberts even shows restraint by not hav­ing them attacked every time they leave the safe­ty of the cage. How­ev­er, an unnerv­ing voice in the back of the mind main­tains the fear that Jaws 3000 is about to appear. The use of open space is also manip­u­lat­ed per­fect­ly, the vast empti­ness of the ocean even­tu­al­ly becomes over­whelm­ing as the two leads bob up and down like human bait.

47 Metres Down pro­duces plen­ty of jumps and even some unin­ten­tion­al laughs. It’s a film that knows exact­ly what it is and always plays to the genre’s strengths for a sur­pris­ing­ly effec­tive experience.