47 METRES DOWN

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

"You go inside the cage.... cage goes in the water.... you go in the water.... shark's in the water." It's surely incredibly difficult to make a film featuring an anti-shark cage and not bringing to mind any one of dozens of iconic moments from Jaws. This frankly isn't in that league - it doesn't have any of Jaws' snappy humour and the score (by the annoyingly uncapitalised tomandandy) is so far away from John Williams it's not in the same ocean - but on the spectrum of shark movies it's up there with The Shallows as one of the best recent examples.

To be honest 47 Metres Down is not exclusively a shark movie: our heroines have far more problems than a couple of Great Whites cruising around for nibbles. Holidaying in Mexico, sisters Kate and Lisa (Claire Holt and Mandy Moore) decide to go out and watch sharks from the safety of a metal cage. It's obviously a bad idea: Lisa has never been scuba diving before, the captain (Matthew Modine, who's surprisingly given almost nothing to do) immediately strikes you as deeply untrustworthy, and the boat's chains and winching mechanisms are rusted through, but they do it anyway. So it's hardly a surprise that rather than dangling around at a mere five metres, the line snaps and they end up plummeting to the sea bed...

This is a pretty good suspenseful nail- (and everything else-) biter that keeps raising the stakes: they've only got a limited air supply AND the winch has crashed onto the top of the cage AND they're slightly too far out of radio range from the ship, which might no longer even be there. In the dark. And, of course, there are sharks in the water. Pretty much the entire movie takes place underwater: there's no cutting back to the ship or dry land, so we're with the two girls almost all the time. Their backstories - one's adventurous and thrill-seeking, one's more timid and coming out of an unhappy breakup - are efficiently enough sketched in and, apart from a bit of "this is awesome!" squealing before the bad stuff kicks in, they're never actively annoying.

Wisely, 47 Metres Down plays it entirely straight and never descends to injokes or geeky movie references, and the shark appearances are entirely convincing (again, see The Shallows, as opposed to the shoddy CGI idiocies of the Sharknado variety), partly because for a lot of the time they're an malevolent threat in the darkness. Sure, there's an "oh, come on!" plot development in the final stretch that felt cheap (though, to be fair, it was foreshadowed in the dialogue earlier) and lowered the tension noticeably but it didn't bother me, or those immediately around me, as much as it has apparently annoyed others. The end result is Johannes Roberts' most enjoyable film thus far (and I generally liked Storage 24 and The Other Side Of The Door): the tension is cranked up at a steady pace and the jump moments are nicely timed. Also, kudos for not using Meters in the title for the UK release.

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