A surfer girl, stinging jellyfish, fire coral and a sadistic great white shark combine for a fun body-horror flick.
The Shallows (2016) was in theaters when my 18 year old son was preparing to leave the USA to spend a few years doing humanitarian work in Kiribati – an island chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He would be living in a hut with no running water, no toilet, no electricity, no refrigeration and no medical facilities nearby if he got hurt.
The main way the locals survived was by going out in little boats each day and catching fresh seafood – fish, octopus… whatever snagged their lines (which they fished with using their hands instead of with poles). I learned that sharks were very common in the areas he would be fishing. I naturally imagined him getting dragged over the edge of the boat by a shark since the fishing line would be wrapped around his hand.
As any loving father would do, I decided to try to manipulate his future choices by scaring the hell into him.
I took him to see The Shallows to help him develop a healthy fear of sharks – something he had not developed even after I received a small shark bite on my collar bone by a little guy once when my son and I were swimming in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida.
My fearmongering didn’t deter my son from going fishing off the coast of Kiribati, since he had to do it to survive, but it did persuade him to not go swimming in dangerous waters for fun. He kept a digital camera charged using a solar panel charger and took photos. He showed me some of the huge yellow-fin tuna he had reeled in with his hands after he returned home to the states. They had big chunks missing from their bodies from where sharks had taken bites out of them as they were being reeled in. It was a miracle that he never got pulled into the water.
He also showed me how they killed the octopus that they caught… they picked them up and bit their heads until they were dead. Gross.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this movie. I don’t know why it doesn’t get better reviews. It’s a lot of fun and has some cringe-inducing body horror that gets me every time. It’s not Jaws, but it doesn’t intend to be. Judging it by its own merits, I think the film is really enjoyable.
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Plot Summary from Wikipedia (Spoilers)
Shortly after the death of her mother due to cancer, medical student Nancy Adams travels to a secluded beach in Mexico, the same beach her mother visited while she was pregnant with her. Carlos, a friendly local resident, gives Nancy a ride and drops her off at the beach, while a friend of hers who came along with her is staying back at a hotel after partying too much. Nancy joins two other locals and the three surf for several hours. Taking a break from surfing, Nancy video-chats with her younger sister Chloe. When she talks to her father in an emotional and strained conversation, it is revealed that her mother’s death caused Nancy to consider dropping out of medical school.
While surfing one last time for the day, Nancy notices the carcass of a young humpback whale nearby. As she rides the last wave back to the beach, a large 23 ft (7.0 m) great white shark knocks her off her surfboard and bites her leg. Nancy climbs onto the whale carcass, but the shark rams it from underneath, forcing her to swim to an isolated rock. She uses her surfboard strap to slow the bleeding from her leg. Later she uses her jewelry to put rudimentary stitches in place to hold her torn flesh together. Nancy is left alone when the unaware locals leave the beach, and she spends the night on the rock with a wounded gull, which was also injured by the shark, and names him Steven Seagull. The next morning, a drunk local man on the beach steals Nancy’s belongings. While wading out into the shallow water to steal Nancy’s surfboard, however, he is killed by the shark. Several hours later, the two locals Nancy had surfed with the day before return. They get into the water before Nancy can warn them away, and are also killed by the shark.
One of the local surfers was wearing a GoPro camera on his helmet. When he was attacked by the shark, his helmet had come off and floated to the surface. Nancy later sees the helmet floating in the water. After some struggle, she is able to retrieve it and notices in the footage of the attack, the shark has a large hook stuck in its mouth after a possible encounter with fishermen. Nancy uses the GoPro to leave messages for her sister and father as well as information about the shark attack and her location.
With high tide approaching, Nancy realizes the rock will be submerged soon. After sending Steven Seagull toward shore on a piece of the surfboard, and timing the shark’s circles from the whale carcass to the rock, Nancy swims to a nearby buoy, narrowly avoiding the shark by swimming through a group of jellyfish, which sting both the shark and her. Nancy finds a flare gun on the buoy. She shoots one flare to draw the attention of a faraway cargo ship, but the ship has already turned away and does not see her. She then fires another flare at the shark, setting the oil from the whale carcass alight and angering it, but otherwise having no effect. The shark then ferociously attacks the buoy and rips out the chains securing it to the ocean bed. Nancy straps herself to the last remaining chain and as it is ripped from the buoy, she is pulled down to the ocean floor, pursued by the shark. At the last moment, Nancy pulls out of the dive, and the shark impales itself on rebar protruding from the buoy’s anchor.
Later, a boy named Miguel (from the opening of the film at the beach) finds the action camera and informs his father, then revealed to be Carlos. Carlos finds Nancy floating close to shore and revives her. Nancy briefly sees a hallucination of her mother. As she looks around the beach, she sees that Steven Seagull has made it to the shore. One year later, a healed Nancy (now a doctor) and her sister Chloe go surfing in Galveston, Texas, as their father tells Nancy that her mother would have been proud.
