Netflix’ Under Paris is every killer shark movie in one

There are two ways to make a shark attack film. You can set it at sea, where most sharks live, and try to Character, plot, gripping actionand maybe exaggerated entanglements to give your story a unique feel. Or you can attract viewers by putting sharks in places where no one expects sharks – fly through the air and land anywhere in Los Angeles! Stroll the streets of downtown New Orleans! Swimming through the snow in a ski resort! Bursting out of the ground in the jungle! Most filmmakers who choose the latter path must abandon any sense of reality and turn to the absurd. Netflix’s French thriller Under Parisout of Hitman Director Xavier Gens, is a bold attempt to have it all.

Gens and co-writers Maud Heywang and Yannick Dahan seem to want their thriller to be both a serious, thoughtful, character-driven film and a lurid, bloody thriller about a computer-generated shark using humans as bait in the City of Light. This plot strains credibility at every turn, but Gens refuses to give in to anything in terms of tone or realism that you’d expect from a film about a “shark in an impossible place.” Instead, he gives the film the most serious face he can.

Nevertheless, it is a extremely silly and not particularly scary movie.

Oscar nominee for Best Actress Bérénice Bejo (The artist) plays Sophia, a marine researcher whose Shark tagging project went horribly wrong when a Mako named “Lilith” attacked her diving crew years ago. Sophia is so traumatized that she spends most of the film with an unchanging, half-determined/half-lost expression on her face, and ends up in Paris, aimlessly lecturing on aquariums to naughty school classes.

Her past resurfaces (along with a familiar fin) when passionate young activist Mika (Léa Léviant) contacts her on behalf of a resistance group called SOS (Save Our Seas). Mika’s team hacks into wildlife tagging systems to disable the tags so fishing boats can’t use them to pinpoint the animals’ locations. SOS is tracking Lilith’s tag and has tracked her to the Seine. Mika, her hacktivist friend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto), and their group plan to save the shark by luring it back to the sea. Sophia just wants to prevent the Parisians from being eaten by a deep-sea shark they’re not expecting in a relatively shallow freshwater river.

As much as this premise feels like cult movie nonsense aimed at fans of trashy monster movies, there is at least a little science behind it. Sharks have been The Thames in EnglandSome shark species Navigate through freshwater or the transition from rivers to oceans and backand dwindling habitats and rising global temperatures have caused many animal species to behave strangely or evolve rapidly to fit into new ecosystems(The film also draws heavily on current Real attempts to detoxify the Seine so that it can be used for the 2024 Olympic Games.)

All this makes Under Paris one of the most substantial of the many horror films about water attacks that followed in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s The White shark, at least for most of the term. The lead roles are played by established actors with well-earned reputations who exude a grim, emotional determination. The camerawork is razor-sharp and superbly lit, a highlight in an era of grim cinematography. The themes of climate change and generational conflict have a certain resonance. At almost every moment, this film asks the audience to take everything at face value.

Gens and his co-writers don’t want to get too caught up in the film’s details. Whenever a character brings up the improbability of a giant Mako killing Parisians, Sophia changes the subject as quickly as possible with a snappy “You didn’t question it when it was a beluga whale!” or a casual comment on climate change and evolution.

Cram the script with characters and plot lines acts as a similar distraction, designed to keep viewers from thinking too much about what they are watching. This is perhaps the best explanation for most of the scenes featuring Nassim Lyes, the lead actor in Gens’ hard-hitting action film Chaos!as Sergeant Adil, the leader of an eerily militarized police force called the River Brigade, which polices the Seine and arrests unauthorized divers and kayakers. His group, of course, initially refuses to believe that a shark exists, and then rejects the idea of ​​rescuing it rather than killing it.

A surprising percentage of Under Paris101 minutes of running time are devoted to Adil and others arguing about the shark’s existence and trying to prove or disprove it. At times, it’s a tedious process, since the audience already knows the answer. But at least it’s a way to solve one of the biggest problems most movies about shark attacks in the ocean face: how to keep getting people back into the water where they can be dramatically eaten. Eventually, though, the action picks up – and that’s when Gens changes direction, abandoning the seriousness and turning the film into the lurid, over-the-top, eye-rolling pulp flick it tried so hard to avoid.

If one wants to define the “two ways to make a shark movie” on an even simpler axis, one could also say that the basic paths “copycat The White shark for everything you are worth” and “Do literally anything else.” Again, Under Paris has it both ways. First, Gens and his colleagues create unique characters and go their own way. Then they introduce the big, important international swimming event that is to take place in the Seine and the money-hungry mayor who won’t listen to reason and refuses to cancel the event just because people keep getting killed. Suddenly the film feels like a pale echo of Spielberg’s masterpiece, following his script line for line, right down to the obligatory scene where Sophia makes a dramatic discovery during a shark autopsy.

But when the inevitable bloodbath begins, Under Paris seems instead to be copying from much more chaotic shark attack movies: an unlikely dichotomy of a diver straight out of Deep blue seamixed with Piranha 3D‘s flood of over-the-top CG water action. All of this leaves Under Paris it feels like a sloppy attempt to reach all possible viewers at once, in a way that doesn’t really serve any of them.

None of these strange tonal shifts, imitations or narrative overfills would mean anything if Under Paris was exciting, scary and captivating. Scientists and researchers complain that the endless stream of killer shark films irrational fear of animals that are generally not so dangerousbut it seems natural that audiences should have a fascination with and fear of primal killers that most victims will never see coming. Killer shark movies – both the tongue-in-cheek, ridiculous “land sharks gone wild” variety and the at least somewhat plausible ones – will continue to be made as long as people remember their first experience of seeing them. The White shark and hope to restore this exciting tension.

But regardless of which mode filmmakers choose to use in a shark movie, they have to give that mode something of value. Under Paris gets about halfway there on every front – drama, thrills, terror, character conflict, humanity-versus-nature messages – and not much further. It is a film destined to be overtaken within a year by its own “every shark attack in Under Paris“YouTube Supercut, when someone realizes how easy it would be to take this distracted, everything-focused film and distill it down to a much simpler experience aimed at a much simpler audience.

Under Paris is now streaming on Netflix.