Let's hear it for the sharks

Open Water is being touted as one of the most frightening films to chomp into your psyche for a long time, but either I'm secretly being fed sedatives or this is a case of good old hype meets collective hysteria. Certainly, there is no doubting the production's gritty authenticity, made as it was by Chris Kentis and his partner-cum-producer Laura Lau for approximately 27p, but low budgets don't necessarily make cinematic art, any more than high ones can invariably pass off rotten fish on the thrashing public.

The premise of Open Water is dead simple: Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan play Daniel and Susan, a young couple who head off on holiday to the Caribbean. These photogenic thirtysomethings are on the run from their stressful yuppie lives: he is putting in a boiler, she - to judge from her mobile-phone conversations - is engaged in the preproduction of a movie.

The day after they arrive on an unidentified island, they set off on a scuba-diving trip, together with 20-odd other neoprene fetishists. The crew of the dive boat are short on basic numeracy, as well as safety procedures, and a mix-up over counting the divers in after their 35-minute reef-goggling sesh, leaves our heroes adrift in open water.

What follows is a mounting catalogue of horrors: first the sheer intensity of the abandonment itself; then the sting of jellyfish; then the hurl of seasickness as Susan's Dramamine runs out; then hunger and dehydration, until - yes, you guessed it - the sickle-mouthed supporting cast begin to circle. Of course, in order for Open Water truly to bite, there needs to be a good fit between its upper and lower teeth. On the one jaw, we must feel the requisite sympathy for the protagonists - if we don't care about them, we won't care if they're fish food - on the other jaw, we have to sense the awesome power and alien vastness of the encompassing briny.

I didn't mind Travis and Ryan at all. True, their relationship has all the emotional realism of two Ikea flat packs engaged in passionate congress, but in the lobby of mirrors that is contemporary society perhaps this is what we've all become? Actually, as they awkwardly embraced and uttered platitudes while the low-fi camera led us from their modern colonial house to the plane, to their utilitarian hotel room, Open Water reminded me of nothing so much as one of those wooden exercises in soft porn that Channel Five used to specialise in screening.

However, when it came to the squidge, instead of the marrying of Big Shoulders and Pert Buttocks, we got mosquito-swatting and fretful sleep. Doubtless Kentis thought that this veering away from the obvious would make us more sympathetic to the duo once they were adrift, but personally I needed to see some chemistry between them other than seasickness medication.

As for the Open Water itself, there's no doubting the authenticity of Kentis and Lau's photography and we really do feel we're trapped in the same patch of aqua as Susan and Daniel. But whether photographed from below, their frogmen legs wavering in the turquoise, or above, their sleek seal heads bobbing in glaucous troughs, or the side, their saturated features drenched with anxiety, the fact remains that without those crucial long shots (presumably disallowed on budget considerations) we have no way of apprehending quite how open these waters are.

There was this, and there was the pervasive grittiness of the film's surface. I'm no techie, but it looked to me as if this had something to do with the digital stock being enhanced to 70mm. Whatever the cause, it gave the wet, wet, wet a rather too dry aspect.

These are my criticisms, yet having uttered them I find there was also much that I did like about Open Water, just not the things it is being sold on. As Susan and Daniel bob through the grief process of their abandonment (to adopt the current psychobubble), they experience denial (he retails factoids gleaned from the Discovery Channel and Dive Magazine); anger (they turn on each other with spiteful, petty blame, then he flails about shouting); and finally weary acceptance (they float in each others arms, a couple of Ophelias straight from Central Casting).

And so their relationship eventually acquires a prosaic believability; to paraphrase Freud, in our dreams we may all be surrealists, but under attack by sharks we are all incorrigibly bourgeois.