Independent filmmaker Chris Kentis directs the dramatic thriller Open Water, based on a true story. Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) are a busy married couple on an island vacation. They board a vessel called the Reef Explorer with a group of other scuba divers, traveling 15 miles out to sea. Since they are certified to dive in open waters, the couple breaks off from the group to go exploring. The Reef Explorer accidentally leaves without a proper head count, leaving them
stranded in shark-infested waters. Kentis and producer wife Laura Lau did all the filming themselves in the actual ocean without extraneous special effects, while the actors wore special steel-mesh under their wetsuits in the scenes where actual sharks were involved. Open Water was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 as part of the American Spectrum competition. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi
Kentis and Lau have labored to make an almost documentary-style film. It's meant to make us feel like we are really there, and to a large extent it succeeds.
The narrative is too inevitable and unrelenting to really entertain a viewer, but there is that image of the man and the woman, together, alone and adrift, which communicates a very powerful and even mythic portrait of the human experience
Open Water depends on the audience to be able to vicariously place themselves in the situation at hand, and if you can do that, you're in for a nerve-frying treat.
A really interesting concept that's HORRIBLY executed. There's no plot. Only a lot of bickering, the occasional scream, and a situation that runs out of gas about half way through the film. Thank god they all died.
How unsettling of a thought that this has all happened for real. I can't imagine a situation more terrifying than being alone and helpless in shark-infested waters. Filming it with handheld cameras, using only unknown actors, added even more to the realism. Most of the suspense doesn't kick in until in the second half,
but once it gets there, it's a non-stop sensation of dread and high anxiety. Because where Jaws was just fiction, the events behind this movie are anything but.
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