Movie Review: 47 Meters Down
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Movies set in one location can be tricky. Films like Phone Booth (2002), Buried (2010), and arguably the best of the bunch, Locke (2013), know how to create suspense and tension by changing the stakes and situation without multiple locations. They gave the protagonists little tasks throughout the film that brought them one step closer to getting out of their situation. It can make for simplistic, and often entertaining pieces of cinema, and that’s exactly what 47 Meters Down is.
The plot, just like other single-location thrillers, is incredibly straight forward. Two sisters, Lisa (Many Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt), are on a trip to Mexico and go out to swim in shark-infested waters to add a little adventure to their lives. The boat might be small, the shark cage looks a little rusty, and they’re out with people they just met, but hey, what could go wrong? Well, a lot. The two sisters put on some scuba gear, jump in the cage, and go underwater for what is only supposed to be a five-meter-dive. However, as we know the movie is not called 5 Meters Down, the cage gets detached from the boat and the sisters go sinking all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Bet you can guess how far down they fall.
What follows are some incredibly well-staged set pieces and situations the sisters must get through for the next hour and some change. Now before we get to what I consider the strong portion of the movie (the second and third acts), I must mention the film’s dreadful first act. Ultimately, audience members will most likely forget the first twenty minutes or so because all the action occurs later in the film, but this first act is brutal. The acting, writing, directing, and overall feel for the movie is just terrible. The character motivations are so forced and eye-rolling that it kind of doesn’t put the audience on their side. Mandy Moore, who is terrific on NBC’s This Is Us, portrays her character as a whiny, one-dimensional young woman who needs people to tell her what to do. Her sister, played by relative newcomer Claire Holt, is even worse, and the two of them have almost zero chemistry together. This is all fixed once they get sent down to the bottom of the ocean, but the lead up to that is boring and almost ruins the whole movie. It feels like these scenes were shot in a day or two after they had already filmed all of the cool underwater sequences.
Despite the rough waters the audience must navigate for the film’s first twenty minutes, the second and third acts are very entertaining. The film kicks into gear when the cage hits the bottom of the ocean and the sisters are trapped inside. Director Johannes Roberts films the underwater sequences with a kinetic energy that honestly never lets up. He’s able to do so much with the vastness of the ocean floor that offer both sweeping shots and creates a feeling of claustrophobia. That might not make sense if you haven’t seen the movie, but it will once you do. The tasks the sisters must complete make for both suspenseful and terrifying moments throughout the film’s last hour. While 47 Meters Down has more than its fair share of jump scares, what got to the audience was the sense of danger that lurks behind every breath the sisters take. Moore and Holt do an amazing job with the physical demands the film puts on them, and their characters are far less annoying throughout than they are at the beginning of the film.
Mandy Moore and Claire Holt in “47 Meters Down.”
This is being marketed as a shark film, in the vein of the classic Steven Spielberg blockbuster Jaws (1975) or last year’s The Shallows, and the sharks do steal the show when they’re onscreen. The film uses the sharks in a very smart way, where you can always feel their presence even when you don’t see them. None of the moments featuring them feels cheap or dull as you feel their ferocity throughout the final two acts.
However, the sharks are not the only things the sisters are fighting while stuck at the bottom of the ocean, as they began to run out of air and battle other elements under the sea. One complaint I do have regarding the final hour of this movie is that the script lays everything out a little too much. There are moments where characters are explaining what they’re doing or what’s going on when they simply don’t need to, but they do it just so that the audience isn’t in the dark as to what exactly is going on. It’s nothing terrible, I just prefer when things aren’t spoon-fed to us and we can play along with the characters. There are a couple of incredibly predictable moments, and a few others that made the crowd either groan or yell at the screen, which can make for a fun film-watching experience. Nothing the characters do in this movie is incredibly stupid (except maybe agreeing to go on the trip in the first place), but there are moments where the audience knew something bad was going to happen and that led to good-natured crowd interaction. That’s when you know you have the audience hooked, when they care about the characters and are invested in the situation, which is what happens in the second and third acts of this film.
Overall, 47 Meters Down is a fun, suspenseful thriller that might take a little while to get where it’s going, but it’s worth the trip when you get there. It isn’t the best single location movie in recent memory, nor the greatest shark movie ever, but it is an enjoyable summer thriller. If you are sick of big-budget summer blockbusters, this low-budget shocker could do the trick. There are plenty of tense and fun moments that make 47 Meters Down a plunge worth taking.
Scott Davis
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