By Last Caress.

Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are sisters, on holiday in Mexico. Lisa is coming to terms with having very recently been dumped by her beau and, to assist in keeping Lisa’s mind from her grief, Kate books an hour-long session of “swimming” with great white sharks – from inside the relative safety of an undersea observation cage, of course – because I guess simply partying hard in the hardest partying country on Earth just won’t get it done, eh?

Anyway, the plan: Once the shark tour boat captain (Matthew Modine) has chummed the water to draw in a shark or two, he’ll get the girls into their masks and oxygen tanks, and pop them into the observation cage which he’ll then lower with a winch to a depth of roughly five metres, keeping radio contact at all times with the girls who should be plenty busy enjoying the majestic natural spectacle of great white sharks in their natural habitat. And that’s precisely how the plan goes.

Until the winch cable snaps, plummeting Lisa, Kate and their cage 47 meters down to the ocean bed, cut loose from the boat, in the dark, out of radio range, running out of oxygen and surrounded by great whites.

I love a good shark movie. The problem with finding a good shark movie though is that, as with Bigfoot films and Godzilla pics, the ratio of good ‘uns to f*ckawful ‘uns is heavily stacked in favour of the crap. There’s Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) of course, and Open Water (Kentis, 2003)… then what? The Reef (Traucki, 2010), Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978) maybe. Many have a fondness for Deep Blue Sea (Harlin, 1999); personally, I’ve a bit of a blind spot for Bait (Rendall, 2012) with its nutty sharks-in-a-shop premise. Recently, The Shallows (Collet-Serra, 2016) drew some interest – I certainly liked it, for the most part – and it would appear I can now add 47 Meters Down, the new movie from British director Johannes Roberts (The Other Side of the Door) to my rather slim list of quality bitey-fishy features. It’s a tense little gem.

From the moment that winch cable breaks, we stay down in the gloomy depths with the girls. An initial  bout of panicked hyperventilation by Lisa is brought under control by Kate but, just watching, I could feel myself struggling for air along with her. The temptation for the girls to clamber out of the cage and bolt for the surface is palpable but it’s not that simple; even if they could avoid the enormous predators circling them, they risk contracting decompression sickness (the bends) which could kill them if they rise from that depth too quickly. They do have to leave the relative short-term safety of the cage though, both to rise to a depth shallow enough to a least re-establish contact with the boat, and to collect the spare oxygen tanks the crew are going to drop down to them so’s they don’t drown while they wait for the coast guard. Their rapidly diminishing air supply is a constantly ticking time bomb, underpinning all of the other issues piling up before the increasingly terrified sisters, played with a good deal of honesty by Ms. Moore and Ms. Holt.

Renamed In the Deep by distributors Dimension Films and initially scheduled for a VOD home release last August, 47 Meters Down was bought at the last minute by Entertainment Studios who returned to the movie its original title and slated it for a thoroughly deserved cinematic release which it will receive in June this year. Catch it as soon as you can.

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