Into The Deep Review: Sexy, Without Boundaries Or Logic
I like shark movies, even if they are pretty predictable. In fact, in most cases, I can tell what will happen in a movie just by its name. That’s why when I saw “Into the Deep,” without too much prior knowledge other than the name of the film and its poster, I knew precisely what to expect: another shark movie about three sexy young men who get lost in the middle of the sea, unbeknownst to anyone, attacked by a shark. It seemed that way until I discovered no shark in this movie, at least not in the sense we know. It consisted of a battle of minds and instincts between three characters, which was messy and unclear, with a few bright spots.
So what are the problems that “Into the Deep’ suffers from, how is it related to contemporary issues related to the relationship between men and women, and was it worth putting a little shark in here? You can breathe deeply, swim into “Into the Deep” review, and decide for yourself.
What Is The Movie Into The Deep About?
“Into The Deep” has received a minimal commercial screening worldwide, but with something like 130,000$ gross, you can understand it was meant for home viewing.
It was directed by Kate Cox, her first feature film after several shorts. The relatively small cast of “Into the Deep” film – again, mainly three characters – includes Ella Ray Smith (“The Commuter” alongside Liam Neeson, and also a very likable horror film called “Seance” with Suki Waterhouse), Matthew Daddario (brother of website darling Alexandra Daddario) and Jessica Alexander (secondary role in “The Little Mermaid” from 2023).
The plot here is quite simple, even too simple. Jess (Ray Smith) is a young girl who can’t quite find herself. She lives in a town near the coast, works in a store, and does not recover from her horrific death by drowning. One day, Jess meets a charming young man named Ben (Daddario) and invites him to a beach party. When she hears he has a yacht, her body’s Schoponi detector kicks in, along with probably a few other hormones. Jedd arrives at his yacht at night, drinks what it is, but falls asleep. When Jess gets up, she discovers that the guy decided to sail with the yacht without asking her, and the warning lights don’t come on for her.
After the two make out on the yacht in a pretty hot sex scene (although the weird guy seems to have forgotten to take his pants off first. I think you should do it), something hits the ship. At that precise moment, I happily got up from the sofa, screamed, “I finally got my shark! YYYYEEEESSS“, took a shark doll from the girls’ closet and started the “Baby Shark” dance with it, which I know thanks to my girls. If there was a shark in my bathtub, I could have had sex with it.
But like every goal in a football game disallowed by VAR in recent years, after a few seconds, I went back to sitting on the sofa next to the shark doll, feeling embarrassed. There is no shark in here. It turns out that the visitor is a girl (Alexander) who arrives on a jet ski while passing out and doesn’t remember too much of what happened. She recovers over time and later joins a rather wild celebration of dancing, drugs, and kissing. After all, this is about three beautiful young people on a yacht.
Without giving too many spoilers, something will happen later, and someone will claim that something has happened now or in the past. The events may connect to the relationship between men and women and the issues that preoccupy the Me Too movement. We must decide with the main character what is happening here: is the man guilty of what the “new” girl claims he did to her? Is that girl just a psychopath who makes things up from her heart? And where exactly does the main character, Jess, stand concerning these issues?
Here is the “Into the Deep” trailer, which, like most movies today, reveals far too much of the film.
Into The Deep, Literally
The main problem with “Into the Deep” is that the film hasn’t entirely decided what it wants to be: and no, don’t let the description here make you think that this is a film reminiscent of Polanski’s masterpiece “Knife in the Water,” which also dealt with power struggles, including sexual ones, of Three people on a yacht. There are too many issues here that it is very tempting to say that their level or application is “Into the Deep,” but that is too predictable, so that I won’t do that.
And yet, its pace is uneven: the beginning is long and tedious until I thought I made a mistake in the movie (or at least, you should try to read more about a film before watching it). There are many references to Jess’s past and her mother’s fate, which need to fit into the plot or contribute much to the development of the character. Although the film’s second half is more interesting, it is hard to argue that the mystery it sets up fascinates the viewer too much: it comes a little too late. It progresses too quickly, and some too many twists and turns need better explanations.
The acting here is reasonable, sometimes more and sometimes less, and there is some overacting. The reason may be related to the dialogue, which is not always convinient. The film does not build tension, both at the level of the specific scene and regarding the general questions it raises regarding the relationships between the characters, and there are moments when it seems more like a romantic drama. The problem is that it’s hard to understand how the characters behave, even in a romantic drama.
Daddario is handsome, but the film does not develop him beyond the character of the “charmer” and, later, “the charmer with the creepy side.” It could be more evident what makes her heroine ignore the warning signs in a guy she met just a few hours earlier. Like most movies set on a ship, especially in the horror or survival thriller genre, the characters sometimes forget their brains at sea and perform actions that are not rational, to say the least.
Never Say No, Me Too Version
Without going too much into spoilers, the film deals with several topical issues in recent years. It presents the complex system between men and women, with the right touches (in this case, touches of a different kind). The point of view here is almost entirely female, even though a man wrote the script (David Betton).
The film directly or indirectly raises questions related to boundaries and where exactly they cross: It is illegitimate for a man to take a woman on a cruise in the middle of the sea while she is asleep (“You should have asked,” she says), but a simple excuse (“You’re right”) and a few kisses can make her forget it.
Later on, issues we know from the news pages will come up, such as consensual sex or not, drugging women, and secretly filming them. The like, and the viewer will have to – perhaps like a judge in a court – decide whether there is a case here, or whether it is a false complaint about sexual harassment, or just a case of lack of understanding. That is, the film certainly comes in a period that justifies the issues it raises, which may be relevant to a certain extent to many men or women, but the engagement with them is sometimes sloppy. A little tightening in the script would have made the result more impressive. Perhaps he would have added more depth to the film, as you might expect from his name.
Into The Deep Review: What’s The Buttom Line?
So why is it still possible to see “Into the Deep,” a far-from-perfect film suffering from many problems? First of all, this is a movie with some decent scenes, mainly those related to the psychic side of one of the characters, and it’s hard to say that I suffered too much during it (hey, it’s also less than an hour and a half long!).
Even though most of the film didn’t manage to put me back on the edge of the couch, it created a claustrophobic feeling for the episodes that I expect from this type of film. In this context, it’s worth crediting the director’s successful use of the minimal location and cast. I did find some interest in the mystery he sets up in his second part, mainly thanks to the character of Lexi, who was vulnerable, tough, and a bit psychotic.
Besides, the cast is quite sexy; a large part of the film revolves around a good-looking actor wearing a swimsuit, and there is some nudity that has pretty much disappeared from horror cinema in recent years. So, although it was possible to add some shark or something to spice things up, there were movies that I suffered more from. Today, it can be enough.
