What’s It About
Follows a group of five girlfriends who must fight for their lives in open water after a dream wedding transformed into a nightmare.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Something in the Water starts differently than most shark movies in recent years. The film opens with Meg and Kayla, a same-sex couple, being violently beaten by bigots. A year later, Meg is on her way to a wedding, still rattled by the incident, and to make matters worse, Kayla is sent to escort her from the airport. The party strands Meg and Kayla on an off-coast island with no phones, and they must reunite with the bridal party without GPS devices. Only then can everyone think about boating back to the resort, and that’s finally when the shark action begins. However, Something in the Water falls short of expectations. Psychological wounds dominate the first act, and there’s an overwhelmingly cumbersome amount of establishing material without attention to pacing as if audiences pressed play on the wrong movie. The film struggles to execute anything beyond generic character arcs as Lizzie’s bridesmaids face certain death. The focus stays on Meg and Kayla for an impotent examination of the lingering effects of what both partners endured that fateful night. The film’s shark-attack logic is comically flawed, like how a woman standing waist-high in shallows has a chunk bitten out of her calf without anyone seeing the shark. There’s amazingly little effort put into the hows and whys of its survival scenario, as if the story itself is adrift with no idea how to bring everything home. Tones clash, suspense is scrapped, and there’s almost zero momentum. Something in the Water does what a lot of modern genre movies do now: they preface trauma with more trauma. A year before the present-day story, the main character barely survived a vicious street attack after she and her then-partner, Kayla, crossed paths with a gang of homophobes. This moment, while brutal, comes across as a bit forced into the story. The characters find their vacation in ruins once they leave the beach, treading familiar waters. However, nothing that follows ever quite feels as scary or effective. Compared to roaring competitors like The Shallows or 47 Meters Down, it’s a faint whisper of scary-sharky entertainment.
OUR RATING – A SHARK-NUMBING 2