Something In The Water (15)

Lizzie prepares for her dream wedding in the Caribbean and she invites her gals pals to join her in paradise for the nuptials. Cam, Ruth, Meg and her old flame Kayla arrive on cue to lend their support to the bride-to-be. The five young women rent a boat and head to a remote island for an afternoon of fun in the shimmering blue water. A shark attacks Ruth and the other women spirit her back to their boat and make haste towards the mainland.

LondonNet Film Review

Something In The Water (15) Film Review from LondonNet

It has not been safe to go into the water since 1975 when director Steven Spielberg terrorised the fictional New England town of Amity with a flesh-hungry, great white shark. Jaws concealed its titular terror by necessity because the mechanical prop sharks, nicknamed Bruce, malfunctioned on location in the Atlantic Ocean. The digitally rendered predator in Something In The Water is also absent for prolonged periods, forcing two-dimensional characters to literally and figuratively tread water as director Hayley Easton Street merrily sets sail with a leaky script…

Dialogue capsizes from the moment a stricken bride-to-be loudly narrates her dire predicament (“You brought us to shark-infested waters the day before my wedding?”) when she should be dreaming of tiger prawns and sea bass not becoming fish food herself. Survival thrillers including Open Water and The Shallows have played out similar battles between sharks and tasty human prey with ruthless efficiency. When a shark fin does surface here like a submarine periscope, it is merely to telegraph the unhurried demise of the next protagonist without a compelling back story.

A burst of Reach by S Club 7 provides heavy-handed musical foreshadowing. “We’ve got to all stick together/Good friends are there for each other…” harmonise the pop outfit. The contrary heroines in Street’s picture go out of their way to ignore this excellent advice and doggy paddle into the slavering jaws of certain death.

One year after a violent homophobic attack on the streets of night-time London, traumatised survivor Meg (Hiftu Quasem) travels to the Caribbean for the dream wedding of effusive, gal pal Lizzie (Lauren Lyle). Meg is forcibly reunited with ex-girlfriend Kayla (Natalie Mitson) and the other bridesmaids, Ruth (Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart) and Cam (Nicole Rieko Setsuko), whose brother Dominic (Gabriel Prevost-Takahashi) is the lucky groom-to-be. The day before the nuptials, Cam hires a boat and persuades the friends to join her on an expedition to a remote island on the recommendation of the resort’s assistant manager.

“You can’t have a proper adventure on a fancy-pants yacht,” chirrups Cam to justify her questionable choice of water transport. A sun-baked afternoon of wistful reminiscence becomes a living nightmare when Ruth is attacked by a shark. The friends make haste towards the mainland only to puncture the boat’s hull on a pesky reef. The vessel quickly takes on water, stranding the heroines far from help without a mobile phone signal or any way to stop a steady stream of blood from Ruth’s wound attracting the shark to their location.

Something In The Water orchestrates more discomfort on dry land with the hate crime than any of the hysteria at sea. Common sense is shipwrecked: one character bandages an injured hand then lets her bloody appendage fall into in the water as a tasty treat. Whatever is in the water of Street’s film, I am not drinking.

– Sarah Lee