An ever-popular genre, shark attack movies are enjoying a resurgence again this summer after the success of the somewhat-ludicrous Under Paris on Netflix.
But now there’s already another deep-sea horror contender in town, and this British effort is doing it a lot differently.
Aside from Under Paris’s giant shortfin mako shark in the Seine named Lilith, audiences in 2024 have also been treated to an underwater plane wreckage being circled by sharks in No Way Up, and there’s a remarkably similar premise coming up again later this year in Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Sir Ben Kingsley.
This evergreen sharksploitation subgenre will of course always be swimming in the wake of its classic inspiration too, 1975’s Jaws from director Steven Spielberg.
However, with many ways to fin a fish, so to speak, new shark film Something in the Water is adding a more unexpected ingredient to this genre by splicing the usual tale of underwater peril with a female-led narrative and characters.
Oh, and it’s a love story, too.
Directed by Hayley Easton Street in her film feature debut, Something in the Water takes place in the Caribbean after a dream destination wedding turns deadly as five friends are forced to confront their fears and brave the open waters.
While this group of pals try to unpack past trauma, get along and celebrate bride-to-be Lizzie’s (Outlander’s Lauren Lyle) big day, they rent a rickety-looking boat to explore a deserted island on their own.
This is, of course, the perfect recipe for shark-related danger to strike – but it’s initially in the background to exes Meg (Hiftu Quasem) and Kayla (Natalie Mitson), and whether or not they will rekindle their romance after a traumatic incident split them up.
Don’t worry though – for all the blood-thirsty shark enthusiasts, there’s still plenty of blood to spread in the water, and grisly injuries and gnashing of shark teeth to come.
It is, after all, the type of film that can combine S Club 7 on its soundtrack with an anal sex joke and discussions about punctuation as they all drift stranded in the ocean, waiting to be picked off one-by-one by a shark.
The cast and director are all aware of Under Paris but split in their ambitions to see it, with Easton Street joking she’s ‘a bit sharked out’ (‘But I may watch it tonight!’), while actress Natalie Mitson admits to having seen ‘a fair few shark films in my time’ as ‘they’re always good fun’.
‘That’s what makes them so good is that it is so terrifying,’ suggests Mitson, who plays Kayla, to Metro.co.uk. ‘This idea of deep water is like this primal fear that we have built in us, the fear of the unknown.’
Co-star Hiftu Quasem (Prime Video’s Ten Percent), who plays her ex-girlfriend Meg, admits: ‘I think it’s terrifying, but usually the things that tend to terrify me unfortunately seem to intrigue me a lot, and so I always go down a rabbit hole, whatever that may be – in this case, sharks.’
Nicole Rieko Setsuko, who features as the extroverted Cam, sister to bride Lizzie’s fiancé, is in a similar boat, confessing that she can’t really watch shark films ‘because I get really anxious’.
‘I’m always like, “Oh, what’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna get bitten or eaten next?”,’ she jokes, before acknowledging that shark films owe their popularity to itching the scratch many have for that ‘very specific kind of genre and niche’.
‘One of the things that I appreciate about the way that Cat [Clarke, screenwriter] wrote this film is that it subverts a lot of it. It is a shark film, but you’ve got a very different kind of take on how these films normally are,’ Setsuko points out.
And here we circle back to the crucial relationship between Meg and Kayla.
In Something in the Water, screenwriter Clarke hinges a lot of the conflict – certainly before the shark comes sniffing around our heroines – between these two, as they navigate their past together.
But this lesbian relationship is here to guide the film’s narrative rather than be shoehorned in or even sensationalised or sexualised, as many shark films would be wont to do.
‘It was so nice to have the opportunity to work on what is essentially, somewhat in part, a love story in a shark genre film, in a survival thriller genre – just to see those worlds kind of collide, and then make Something in the Water,’ shares Hiftu, who calls her character’s relationship a ‘privilege’ to portray.
Mitson agrees, pointing out that their characters’ ‘rich history’ both adds to the story as a whole and the dynamics between Lizzie, Cam and Ruth.
‘Because they had broken up, it isn’t even like you see them being intimate together, they just had this connection that didn’t need to be overstated,’ the actress adds.
The avoidance of objectifying its female characters in a sub-genre that also includes TV movie Avalanche Sharks, which uses its spring break setting to justify many bikini-clad women parading around a ski resort, is something Setsuko clocked straight away too.
‘I’ve seen in some shark films that women are there for the purpose of being more sexualised. And that’s not what this was: it was written by a woman, for a cast of women, and it was about who they are as people – and that was something that I really loved about the script.’
Setsuko also worried about not connecting with the story due to her ‘limited experience of shark films’ before realising as she read that it was instantly understandable as ‘a story about women put in a horrible situation’.
Easton Street is a former VFX art director and has worked on huge blockbusters in that capacity such as the Star Wars and Fantastic Beasts franchises.
For Something in the Water, she ended up assembling a female-dominant team, aside from the cast onscreen.
‘When we were looking for people to work on the movie, I just wanted the best, most suited people, the people that were right for what we were doing, but, naturally, we were hiring more and more women,’ she explains, noting it’s still ‘not that usual, to be honest’.
‘I’ve worked on a lot of films and it has been traditionally a very male-dominated industry, so it felt really great to break that on this film.’
Something in the Water presented time and budget constraints in terms of creating the big bad shark for its characters to face off against – as well as the injuries sustained – with Easton Street trying to do as much, practically speaking, as was possible.
‘We went old-school with a shark as much as we could, we had a practical fin on the back of a diver.
‘I didn’t want it to be loads of CG shark, and actually, I didn’t really want to show the shark so much, I wanted it to be the fear of the unknown and for that to build up throughout the film.’
Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart, who plays the fifth and final friend, the more responsible and uptight Ruth, actually revelled in the movie’s gore and terror – plus the gross make-up and prosthetics.
‘I loved it, because I love my horror movies!’ she enthuses.
And that’s despite the challenges of filming in open water with changing tides and the natural creatures already lurking therein.
‘There were a couple of times I had little crab nibble at my toes whilst filming,’ she reveals before later remembering the greatest challenge.
‘The seasickness, we didn’t mention the seasickness! Even those that aren’t normally susceptible to seasickness… it was a lot.’
Something in the Water is in cinemas from today.
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