Nancy is a young American student who decides to go on vacation in Mexico to visit an isolated beach where her recently disappeared mother used to go. Accompanied by car by a local man and left alone by her friend still recovering from a hangover, the beautiful tourist arrives at the enchanting place and begins to ride the giant waves with her surfboard, her true great passion. Stunning landscape and unrestrained fun seem to be the protagonists of a dream day for Nancy until an event occurs that will disrupt her stay and put her life at risk: the girl, in fact, approaches a large marine animal killed by bites from a huge and voracious great white shark that interprets the surfer's gesture as an attempt to invade its hunting territory. Thus begins the most classic of duels to the death between man and nature with the protagonist who has in a rock and the low tide the only weapons with which to face the almost invincible fierce beast.
In 1975, a still young Steven Spielberg brings to the screen one of his most famous works, "Jaws". Passed into cinema history, the film marks the beginning of the beast-movie genre that sees precisely in the gigantic and fierce hunter of the seas one of the leading figures. From that moment on, in fact, the screens are teeming with animals of all kinds that attack men both for hunger and to punish human negligence towards nature. Dozens and dozens of titles, including "Piranha", "Cujo", "Killer Whale" to name a few, that however over time have generated a saturation of the genre that has become boring and also uninteresting from a commercial point of view, if one thinks that many films have been relegated directly to DVD distribution. However, for some time now, the wind seems to have changed again and, thanks to the success of a controversial but equally innovative product like "Sharknado", interest in sharks seems to have awakened. Direct consequence of this is this "Paradise Beach- Inside the Nightmare", a very tense aquatic thriller and realized with great skill by an excellent representative of contemporary genre cinema like Jaume Collet-Serra, already known to fans for the remake of "The Wax Mask" and the excellent "Orphan".
When approaching a shark movie, the most common danger is to fall into the repetitiveness mentioned above and tell a predictable and trite story minute by minute. And yet Collet-Serra manages to largely avoid this risk thanks to a plot that, except for a few moments of calm nevertheless legitimate and forgivable, travels on the rails of very high tension and wonderfully exploits every small element at its disposal, even a simple rock and a defenseless seagull. Admirable also is the care in creating a very realistic and disturbing shark not only for its appearance and enormous jaws, but also for its marked cunning with which it sustains a war first and foremost psychological with the unfortunate Nancy. The rest is then done by the extraordinary paradisiacal landscape that becomes a perfect theater of terror and death from which any type of foray into gore is left out, as one would expect in these cases, proof that tension is the main ingredient on which the Spanish director aims.
Yet the film is not exempt from some small flaws, above all the inclusion of secondary characters that affect the intimate character of the plot and invade an ideal ring reserved for the two protagonists Nancy and the shark. Slip-ups that do not affect the overall good outcome of this "Paradise Beach- Inside the Nightmare" which also sees the definitive consecration of a surprising Blake Lively who, in addition to standing out for the beauty of her physique in a swimsuit, demonstrates knowing how to carry the entire film on her shoulders as a great actress would.
Collet-Serra has hit the mark once again and his film is destined to remain a good reference point for a genre, the beat-movie, in slight resurgence - or at least one hopes.
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