Crew
Director – Hayley Easton Street, Screenplay – Cat Clarke, Producer – Julie Baines, Photography – Niels Reedtz Johansen, Music – Nainita Desai & Harry Peat, Visual Effects Supervisor – Steve Street, Visual Effects – Aristoren Filmworks (Supervisor – Robin Aristorenas), DSVFX, Lexhag VFX(Supervisors – Alexis Haggar & Jonathan Hancock), Rumble (Supervisor – Richard Costin) & Tim Walton, Prosthetics Designer – Francesca Van Der Feyst, Production Design – Claire Fleming. Production Company – Dan Films.
Cast
Hiftu Quasem (Meg), Natalie Mitson (Kayla), Lauren Lyle (Lizzie), Nicole Reiko Setsuko (Cam), Ellouise Shakespeare-Hart (Ruth)
Plot
In London, girlfriends Meg and Kayla are walking home when they are attacked and beaten by a girl gang. One year later, Meg arrives in the Dominican Republic to attend the wedding of her friend Lizzie. She is still experiencing trauma from the attack. She is surprised to be met at the airport by Kayla, the two having split up after the attack. Things are strained between them. The day before the wedding, the others persuade Meg to join them on a boat cruise for Lizzie’s last jaunt as a single woman. They head out to an island only to abandon Meg and Kayla there, this having been a ruse to get the two of them back together. Meg and Kayla swim back to join the others. As they play in the water, Ruth is abruptly bitten and her thigh gouged by a shark. The others bandage her with what they have and decide to immediately head back to the mainland to get her to a hospital. However, in their haste to get there, Lizzie steers the boat across a reef outcrop and holes the side. With the boat sinking, they are forced to get into the water and swim back to the mainland, all while Lizzie cannot swim, Ruth is bleeding and the sharks are circling.
Jaws (1975) created the Killer Shark Film. It spawned 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 brought a growing body of killer shark films that are serious survival horror works focused around people stranded in shark-infested waters. The first of these was Open Water (2003) and sequels and was followed by The Reef (2010) and sequel, The Shallows (2016) and 47 Meters Down (2017) and sequel, along with a host of other mostly lesser budgeted efforts such as Adrift (2017), Great White (2021), Swim (2021), Maneater (2022), The Requin (2022), Shark Bait (2022), Shark Waters (2022), The Black Demon (2023), Blind Waters (2023), The Last Breath (2024), Shark Warning (2024), Beast of War (2025), Fear Below (2025), Great White Waters (2025), Into the Deep (2025), The Bay (2026), Chum (2026) and Deep Water (2026).
Something in the Water was a feature-length directorial debut for Hayley Easton Street who had worked in various roles as a visual effects artist since the early 2000s. The film is an all-girl production with all the main speaking roles and most of the tasks behind the camera being performed by women. Actress Lauren Lyle called it Bridesmaids (2008) meets Jaws, which is an inapt comment – it is true in that it is a film that features bridesmaids and sharks but resemblances end about there. Bridesmaids was a comedy, this isn’t; Jaws was about hunting a shark, this is more in the vein of survival in shark-infested waters films like Open Water and The Reef.
I am not sure if an all-girl focus necessarily gives Something in the Water anything different to any of the other survival in shark-infested waters films. This does mean an extruded drama that takes up the first 25 minutes before we get to any sharks. This is centred around assorted bridal dramas and mostly about Hiftu Quasem and her trauma following a homophobic street assault, her difficulty reconciling with girlfriend Natalie Mitson and how the boat trip was a ruse by the others to get the two of them together again. I can’t say these sections did much for me but they fill the time passably.
However, once the sharks enter the equation, Hayley Easton Street does not too badly. After the boat is sunken and the girls are forced to swim across the open water, Easton takes a large leaf from films like Open Water and in particular The Reef. Although Street ups it in having the group of five set out with one of them badly wounded from a gash in the leg and they trying to keep her leg out of the water, another unable to swim and another trying to hold a cellphone up out of the water to get a signal. Hayley Easton Street does okay with the journey back to shore. There is never the paranoid, torturous tension that there is in The Reef, but Something in the Water emerges as one of the better among the survival in shark-infested waters films.
Trailer here