Crew
Director – Matthew Holmes, Screenplay – Matthew Holmes & Gregory Moss, Producers – Michael Favelle & Blake Northfield, Photography – Peter Szilveszter, Music – Angela Little, Visual Effects – NVFX (Supervisor – Chandrakhanth Kannuri & Vishnu Poloju) & The Post Lounge (Supervisor – Jack Mason), Special Effects Supervisor – Julian Summers, Shark Effects – Formation Effects (Creative Director – Steve Doyle), Production Design – Esther Rosenberg. Production Company – Bronte Pictures/Screen NSW.
Cast
Hermione Corfield (Clara Bennet), Jake Ryan (Dylan ‘Bull’ Maddock), Arthur Angel (Ernie Morgan), Jacob Junior Nayinggul (Jimmy Barriakada), Josh McConville (Janusz Wojcik), Maximilian Johnson (Sean Cullen), Clayton Watson (Bob Drummond), Will Fletcher (Sergeant Potter), Kevin Dee (Dwight Lewis)
Plot
New South Wales, Australia, 1946. Clara Bennet works for the Sea Dogs Diving company run by the alcoholic Ernie Morgan. She, Ernie and the Aborigine diver Jimmy Barriakada are hired by Dylan ‘Bull’ Maddock to conduct a dive and retrieve the contents of a van that crashed into a river. Unknown to them, Maddock is a mobster. He refuses to tell them what the contents of the van are – a haul of stolen gold bullion – or that he is planning to kill them at the completion of the dive. The dive proceeds but this is endangered by a bull shark lurking in the waters.
Fear Below was the fourth film for Australian director Matthew Holmes. Holmes had previously made Twin Rivers (2007), The Legend of Ben Hall (2017) and The Cost (2022), which are all non-genre works in the drama and crime genres.
The killer shark film is its own genre – for which see Killer Shark Films. Most of the entries over the last few years have been in the gonzo, deliberately ridiculous field a la Sharknado (2013) but there has been a growing body of serious dramatic films about survival in shark-infested waters – see the likes of Open Water (2003), The Shallows (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017) and others. One of the best of the serious killer shark films was Australian director Andrew Traucki’s The Reef (2010) about a group making a harrowing swim through open shark-filled water back to safety. The other film that draws comparison in terms of its serious survival nature might be Greg McLean’s fine Rogue (2007) about a group on a riverboat stranded on a spit of land by a killer crocodile, or else Andrew Traucki’s previous film Black Water (2007) about three people stranded in a tree by a crocodile in the water below.
It takes quite a while for Fear Below to get into action. For nearly the first half, there is only one underwater scene and one shark attack – and even then what we see of the shark is obscured by the muddy water. I was hoping for another Rogue or The Reef but most of the film during this first half seems taken up by the tensions between the two parties on land.
However, things begin to pick up with the introduction of fisherman Clayton Watson and his abrupt despatch when he goes out in a boat to catch the shark. Thereafter, Matthew Holmes starts to do the things that we want him to. Fear Below becomes quite tension fraught during the dive on the van and the shark’s appearance to attack as they are attempting to winch the gold and then injured bodies back to the shore, alongside various threats and underhand dealings with the gangsters. It all works fairly well. Matthew Holmes quite successfully does what Steven Spielberg did in Jaws (1975) in economically keeping the shark off-screen for the most part, represented only by a fin in the water or a shape appearing through the muddy water below.
Hermione Corfield is a name I have been championing for some time now in the likes of Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018), Sea Fever (2019) and tv’s We Hunt Together (2020-2). The downside is that the role she is given in Fear Below is a generic one that could be filled with any starlet with a modicum of acting talent, nevertheless she does well with it. The rest of the cast are all Australians who are faces that are new to me, but prove generally capable.
Trailer here