By Chris Mace
Images by Meir Gal

September 2004

The independent film Open Water is Chris Kentis and spouse Laura Lau's attempt to leverage the aesthetic of digital video to a chilling effect.

Based on the true story of a blunder in the Australian dive industry that left two divers stranded miles out to sea on the Great Barrier Reef, it is about Daniel and Susan, an American couple on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to salvage their relationship and get away from their work-lives.

At first they have difficulty turning off their cell phones and resisting the pull of the Internet in their hotel room; but soon, both being scuba divers, they head out to sea on a dive tour. After about 40 minutes underwater they resurface to discover the boat has left them floating sixty feet above the reef in shark territory.

With dread not yet in the picture, the problem they seem to have at this point is agreeing on who is to blame for their misfortune. Is it Daniel's fault for keeping them down on the reef for too long or the boat crew's for leaving them behind? However, demoted from the top of the food chain, their annoyance turns to anxiety as they repeatedly fail to get the attention of the abundant coastal traffic in the area, including other dive boats.

Their frustrated disbelief ("We actually gave them money to be in this situation!") gives way to full-blown panic before blossoming into horror - each stage subtly filmed with weather and water conditions that provide an emotionally charged backdrop. Indeed, Kentis talked about the weather as a kind of third character for this film and storm clouds serve as a reminder of nature's indiscriminant power.

"Pretty much every film I have seen ... almost always shoot[s] [sharks] underwater, and people have seen that, especially with the Discovery Channel's shark week and so on. People are used to that and it's not terribly scary," said Kentis, with Lau adding, "We were very inspired by the Dogma [95] movies," referring to a filmmaking tradition that emphasizes economy of production.
In general, they keep the cameras on the surface and the audience guessing about what's below, with the idea being that what you don't see can easily be more frightening than what you do.

That idea is just one parallel that invites an almost inevitable comparison to the Blair Witch Project (1999), which also used digital video to heighten the audience's "buy-in" while keeping the cost down.

Kentis explained they were trying to make an anti-Hollywood film to see if a "down and dirty" movie could get the audience involved. "All the extras are real people, non-actors. We bought them a free dive. The crew knew we were making a movie, obviously, and everybody was essentially playing cards [pretending] but still being themselves."