47 METERS DOWN

Lisa and Kate are two sisters who came to Mexico for a vacation of relaxation, fun, and contact with untouched and unknown nature, and also to distract themselves from the disappointments of daily life, as in the case of Lisa, who has just been left by her boyfriend. During an evening at a nightclub, the young women meet two boys who propose an adrenaline-filled experience: going out to sea and diving in a cage at dozens of meters deep with many white sharks around. Kate, the more extroverted and enterprising of the two, immediately accepts, and thus the protagonists find themselves the following morning on the boys' boat, but still unaware that their vacation is about to turn into the worst of nightmares. Due to a technical problem, the cage detaches from the mechanical arm and sinks to 47 meters deep, and Lisa and Kate will have to face a pack of hungry sharks and a race against time. The shark movie genre has had enormous success since its origins, which, however, has been followed over the years by a physiological decline in interest and average quality of the titles proposed, also due to the strange and complex stylistic and productive trajectory that has seen it as the protagonist. Born in 1975 from the mind of a great director like Steven Spielberg (how can one forget his cult "Jaws"), the subgenre with marine monsters as protagonists quickly abandoned the authorial phase to live first a long period of seriality, with all the pros and cons of such a purely commercial approach, and then take a decidedly trashy turn with Asylum and its shark tornadoes and enormous robots. In short, an inexorable downward trajectory for a genre that is only regaining its dignity in recent years thanks to some well-made films like "Open Water" by Chris Kentis and "Paradise Beach" by J. Collet-Serra, to which this "47 Meters Down" by Johannes Roberts can now be added. The English director, fresh from the good "The Other Side of the Door," returns with a more than successful aquatic thriller, very tense, well shot, and accompanied by a well-crafted and coherent screenplay. Roberts' great insight is realizing that to revive a now monotonous and flat genre, one must remove the centrality from the sharks, until now the undisputed masters of this type of film, and put in place a story that moves on several levels both stylistically and narratively. "47 Meters Down," in fact, presents a very varied plot in which the dangers for the two unfortunate sisters are represented not only by the usual pack of sharks but also and above all by all the other inconveniences resulting from such an extreme situation, particularly the duration of the oxygen tanks, from which arises a breath-taking and suspense-filled race against time. But Roberts' film is not just entertainment and a succession of scary scenes because we also find a particular care for the psychological description of the two protagonists, whose controversial but nevertheless affectionate relationship is well delineated and made functional to the narrative developments. Very positive performances from a cast that includes Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, respectively as Lisa and Kate, Yani Gellmane, Santiago Segura, and veteran Matthew Modine. In short, this time Roberts has hit the mark with a fast-paced product and absolutely recommended for those who want to spend an evening under the sign of fear and the feeling of being surrounded. A success, not surprisingly, that occurred under the protective wing of executive producer Alexander Aja.