Director/Screenplay – Le-Van Kiet, Producers – Cameron Burns, Jordan Dykstra, Aaron B. Koontz, Todd Lundbohm, Ashleigh Snead & Ellen Wander, Photography – Matt S. Bell, Music – Jean-Paul Wall, Visual Effects Supervisor – Alex Euting, Visual Effects – HK Film (Supervisor – Bach Nn) & Platinum Platypus (Supervisor – Pete Sussi), Special Effects Supervisor – Kevin Morissey, Production Design – Maxwell Nalevansky. Production Company – Film Bridge International/828 Media Capital/Choice Films/Paper Street Pictures.
Cast
Alicia Silverstone (Jaelyn), James Tupper (Kyle), Danny Chung (Fisherman), Deirdre O’Connell (Anne), Jennifer Mudge (Lizzie)
Plot
Husband and wife Kyle and Jaelyn have gone to Vietnam to help heal their marriage following a miscarriage. They rent a beachside cabin, which extends out over the water on piles. They are asleep when a storm hits and wake up to find the entire cabin has been washed away. Floating out to sea on the wreckage and with Kyle’s leg wounded, they try to get help from passing planes and ships. During their attempts, the cabin is progressively reduced until they are left floating on debris surrounded by sharks.
Jaws (1975) created the Killer Shark film. It spawned three sequels and a great many imitators. By the late 2000s, these had graduated to the deliberately ridiculous with the likes of Sharknado (2013) and a good many wilfully absurd imitators. The 2010s has brought a growing body of killer shark films that are survival horror works focused around people stranded in shark-infested waters. The first of these was Open Water (2003) and sequels, The Reef (2010) and sequel, The Shallows (2016), Adrift (2017), 47 Meters Down (2017) and sequel, Great White (2021), and the lesser budgeted likes of Swim (2021), Maneater (2022), Shark Bait (2022), Shark Waters (2022) and The Black Demon (2023).
The Requin was the eighth film from Vietnamese director Le-Van Kiet. His other films have been regular dramas and thrillers, among which he has also made the horror films House in the Alley (2012), The Lost Tour: Vietnam (2014) and The Ancestral (2022). What gained Le-Van Kiet wider exposure was the acclaim and US release of his action film Furie (2019). The Requin comes produced by director Aaron B. Koontz, who made the horror films Camera Obscura (2017) and The Pale Door (2020), and has produced a number of other works of recent.
The Requin looks a reasonably expensive production. Despite being set in Vietnam and having a Vietnamese director, everything was actually shot at the Universal Studio water set in Florida. There are some not too bad effects gone into the shooting of the scenes where the house gets washed away in the storm and of Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper adrift at sea. And there is some nice underwater photography and very convincing looking scenes where the sharks appear to attack.
Husband wife James Tupper and Alicia Silverstone floating on driftwood in shark-infested waters
Once the sharks enter the scene, the film draws heavily on the playbook established by Open Water and in particular The Reef with parties trying to swim through shark-infested waters. In repeating all the scenes with people adrift, camera shots looking up from beneath the water at their feet coming down from the surface, and the abrupt appearance of fins in the water behind them, Le-Van Kiet achieves an undeniable tension in a number of scenes.
That said, Le-Van Kiet also offers up over-hyped dramas with Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper tying to signal the plane, or Danny Chung’s efforts to sew up Alicia Silverstone’s leg wound. Not to mention, a scene where Alicia Silverstone makes it to shore that gets dragged out for several minutes where we are made to think that maybe she didn’t and then the ghost of James Tupper appears to tell her to keep on going, which starts to become absurd as the scene drags on.
In all of this, some scenes cannot help but seem eminently daft. Like when Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper try to start a fire to alert a passing ship and then moments later abruptly realise “oh shit, we just set our entire survival platform on fire and now we’re floating in shark-infested water with only driftwood to cling to.” One of the prime moments that bad movie fans love is the one where Alicia Silverstone is aboard a small coracle at the climax and takes on the oncoming shark with an outboard motor. This is followed by an equally ridiculous scene where she is trapped under the overturned coracle and then somehow manages to kill the shark by raising the anchor and convincing it to bite on that instead of her.
