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‘47 Meters Down: Uncaged’: Not your average shark week
The meticulously designed sets in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged mark a major departure from the original 47 Meters Down (2017) in which director Johannes Roberts conjures palpable fear from the vast expanse of the open sea that renders the presence of humans utterly insignificant.
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A still from '47 Meters Down: Uncaged' (Courtesy of/Entertainment Studios)
We rarely see it coming.
It is only with the advantage of hindsight are we able to trace an unprecedented force to its roots, occasionally making a fool out of ourselves for overlooking something so blindingly obvious.
No, I’m not talking about great white sharks and their knack for concealing their enormous bodies in plain sight, waiting in giddy anticipation to catch their human prey off-guard – a recurring image in films capitalizing on the gory exploits of the (mostly) cold-blooded predators such as this one.
I’m waxing poetic about the man that enables killer sharks to morph into borderline supernatural murder machines this summer; a man who, for some inexplicably elitist reason, has been unfairly excluded from the discourse surrounding the contemporary renaissance of genre cinema despite his generous contributions to the form.
His name is Johannes Roberts – a burgeoning British genre auteur who, much like the sneaky killer sharks of his creation, emerges from obscurity and grabs unsuspecting audience members by the throat through his various displays of ingenuity. We never saw him coming.
Roberts’ latest directorial outing, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, concerns a troupe of high school girls as they embark on a predictably ill-fated underwater exploration of ancient Mayan ruins in Yucatán, Mexico. As if the labyrinthine network of claustrophobic tunnels that make up most of the ruins are not life-threatening enough, Roberts casually throws a bunch of great white sharks into the mix – you know, for the sake of variety. Thus begins the girls’ fight for survival as the walls – both literal and proverbial – close in on them.
The cast of characters comprises basic facsimiles of slasher film archetypes: there’s Mia (Sophie Nélisse), the bookworm poised for ‘final girl’ status; Sasha (Corinne Foxx), the moderate pacifist; Nicole (Sistine Stallone), the klutz whose actions spur audiences to hurl insults at the screen; and Alexa (Brianne Tju), the relatively sound-minded group leader.
Calling 47 Meters Down: Uncaged a slasher seems appropriate. Roberts, who is not a stranger to the genre coming off, well, The Strangers: Prey At Night ( 2018 ), clearly channels and occasionally recycles numerous tropes of the genre, including one that sees surviving protagonists square off against the seemingly unbeatable villain following an obligatory final twist.
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The slasher angle suits Roberts’ proclivity for tautly choreographed kills in confined spaces. The immersive sets standing in for ancient ruins and dimly-lit caves prove to be a terrific sandbox for the filmmaker to play in; they come with naturally ominous negative spaces that are essential for well-staged jump-scares. There’s one particular sequence in the film’s middle half that effectively evokes Alien ( 1979 ), The Descent ( 2005 ) and Don’t Breathe ( 2016 ) in one fell swoop.
The meticulously designed sets in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged mark a major departure from the original 47 Meters Down ( 2017 ), in which Roberts conjures palpable fear from the vast expanse of the open sea that renders the presence of humans utterly insignificant.
The filmmaker still borrows several plot devices from his inaugural killer shark film, such as the constantly diminishing oxygen levels of the submerged protagonists that serve as the film’s equivalent of a ticking time bomb. However, murderous sharks and aquatic settings are the only semblance of connection between the two films as 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is not so much a sequel as it is a refinement of a decent prototype.
Roberts, who is currently hard at work on the upcoming reboot of the Resident Evil film franchise, has finally established himself as a visual stylist to be reckoned with. Sure, he has always excelled in blocking and establishing unnerving mise en scène, but with 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, he crafts some truly striking images that count among the most memorable in recent years.
Consider the shot of a stone statue sitting in silence as it observes the unnatural slaughter taking place in its eternal abode. Or a second-act montage that reduces the protagonists’ desperate escape to a series of stuttering images illuminated by strobe lighting, with non-diegetic score bleeding into in-universe cacophony. Or even the great white sharks themselves, which are often framed as mystical beasts hailing from a primal past, angered by the humans’ intrusion of their stasis.
The medium of cinema boils down to the singular act of sorcery in which once-still images are liberated from their static origins to grow into fluid reflections of the known and the unknown. Images, then, don’t get more cinematic than the ones composed by Johannes Roberts. (mut)
