Fear Below

Fear Below promises a slick, high-concept twist on the shark movie-gangsters in 1940s Australia diving for gold in a bull shark-infested river-but squanders that promise with lifeless characters and limp storytelling.

Yes, the setting is cool. The idea of bull sharks lurking inland is genuinely unnerving, and the film does its homework on the science. The riverside visuals are lush, the period costumes crisp, and the setup has all the makings of a pulpy thriller. But the second the characters open their mouths, the whole thing sinks.

Hermione Corfield, Jimmy Barriakada, and Arthur Angel try to inject humanity into their roles as plucky divers with tragic backstories, but they're shackled by a script that mistakes vague trauma for personality. Their motivations are murky, their relationships undercooked, and their dialogue painfully on-the-nose. You're left counting the minutes until the next shark attack-because that's the only time the movie comes alive.

Worse still, the film seems desperate to be more than a B-movie, reaching for emotional depth it simply hasn't earned. It's like The Meg trying to cosplay as The Hurt Locker. The result is a film caught between tones: too self-serious to be fun, too shallow to be profound.

When the shark does show up, it delivers a few decent jolts-but even the action lacks inventiveness. For a film that should be dripping with tension, Fear Below is oddly inert.

First things first, it's a quite enjoyable experience. Shot without long and boring scenes, not much hesitations and conflicting feelings. Well-packed pace and three-acted story. Expected, but still worthy end of the story.

Well, it somehow reminds me of 2000-s era action/adventure flicks: not much dramatic insights, but still delivered joy. That can be an advantage and disadvantage at the same time. You won't get deep characters, there's no sophisticated story: just a beginning-climax- resolution. I wanted to like characters, but they were... mildly blank? I don't really think, there will be a reason to re-watch it in the future. But still it's worth watching, when you just want some adventure fun for your Friday evening.

Aussie filmmaker Matthew Holmes takes a dip into sharksploitation territory with Fear Below. The man previously helmed the 2016 western film The Legend of Ben Hall after a successful run of crowd-funding, and eight years later he has stepped up to tackle a different genre. Fear Below arguably presents a step-up for the filmmaker with a more refined vision and a more memorable final product, although it does still show areas for him to grow.

I remember very little about The Legend of Ben Hall outside of the fact that it was visionary, utilising solid production values and having an authentic western feel. The narrative itself was largely forgettable and the film left little impact on me, so I can't say there was much to take away from it. And everything I picked up from Matthew Holmes from that movie is amplified in Fear Below, for better and for worse.

Whilst Holmes shows great strength as a director, orchestrating a compelling narrative still appears to be an area in which he has room for improvement. Fear Below kicks off with a bunch of characters we don't know a thing about crashing a vehicle loaded with gold bullion into a river with a brief insert that looks like someone threw a toy car into a bathtub. Luckily this is the low point of the special effects in the film as everything is far better from there, but the narrative continues go steer through a stormy sea. Holmes' gang of criminals have little personality outside of being thin criminal archetypes, and they aren't given enough character gimmicks to make them particularly engaging. Jake Ryan portrays a stereotypical 1940's prettyboy gangster, Josh McConville plays his Russian sidekick and Maximilian Johnson plays the young and naive underling. All these actors do a fine job in their roles, but the script doesn't give them much in the way of characters to work with. We have two bad guys who are bad guys just because, and then a young underling who has less lines of dialogue than Silent Bob in a Kevin Smith movie.

When the narrative introduces us to our protagonists Ernie, Clara and Jimmy, we're given a modicum of more character depth. We understand their motives and the stakes of why they need to complete the task of retrieving the sunken treasure, but it's delivered to audiences in a series of rushed sequences of heavy exposition which occasionally come across as patronising. Again, the cast continue to deliver the dialogue with authenticity and charisma, but it doesn't feel like there is sufficient character development going on amongst all this.

We're also quickly given a reveal that our heroes will be facing execution once they complete their job, a plot twist which is spoon-fed to the audience in a conversation between two of the criminals. This came too early, and it was just one of many examples of the film feeling a little too rushed. And as all this was happening, an overbearing musical score played out in every scene which gave Fear Below a sense of overproduced drama, rather ironic considering the film was an indie movie. There was nothing wrong with the quality of the music, but since it was leaned on so heavily during the dialogue-heavy sequences early in the narrative, it left the film feeling a little too heavily dramatised and took me out of the moment.

Fear Below could be improved if there was a greater element of mystery in the story. Since Holmes has a talent for building tension, if he focused on this more instead of relying on heavy exposition, I think Fear Below would see improvement. Rather than depicting the intro scene where the gangsters' prize is sinks to the bottom of the river, I think the film should have focused on more time to spend with our protagonists. The arrival of the gangsters in search of divers could then be played for ominous mystery, teasing the audience to determine what our heroes are retrieving from the water and who their clientele is, before later revealing everything when a bull shark enters the picture. Fear Below has a solid narrative beneath its surface, but Holmes' approach to it could use some refining before putting it in front of the camera.

All that being said, whilst Matthew Holmes' strongest suit may not be in crafting dialogue or characters, it is clear that he remains a storyteller. The turning point in Fear Below comes when Jimmy and Shaun go out into the river to try and catch the shark. From there on, the film holds the viewer firmly in its grasp as Holmes' visionary style and knack for building tension come into full effect. The ambitions of the movie become a lot clearer and less complicated from here on as Fear Below leads into being a tense and well-crafted genre piece, a shark movie set against the backdrop of 1940's period Australia.

Much like the way the characters are left to just try and survive the ordeal the gangsters have forced them into, Fear Below narrows its focus on just trying to be intense and visually striking. As it does this, we begin to care about the characters more. It becomes less about wanting to know them and who they are, rather just wanting to see them survive and triumph in the battle of good vs. Evil, and Holmes manages to direct his cast into delivering enough stellar performances to achieve that goal.

Hermione Corfield is consistently charismatic and charming across the film whilst Arthur Angel has the energy of a natural born leader in his portrayal of Ernie, a flawed man who nonetheless knows his job, his duties and cares about the people around him. Of course the screen is stolen by AACTCA nominee Jacob Junior Nayinggul who previously revealed his true talents as the lead in High Ground and has returned to remind us that it was not a one-off performance. With steady line delivery and a strong physical presence, Nayinggul delivers an intense, understated performance which makes Jimmy Barriakada the true hero of the movie and the one I found most people in the audience rooting for. As for the gangsters, Jake Ryan emits a strong feeling of John Hamm in his brutish portrayal of a 1940's gangster, Josh McConville is a convincing Russki and Maximilan Johnson convincingly portrays the naivety and inexperience of a young criminal in way over his head with few lines of dialogue, even when he deserves more.

The real star of the show, however, is Holmes' technical expertise. The period detail in Fear Below is consistently convincing, even on a shoestring budget. And true to form for a good shark movie, he opts to lean on practical effects in depicting the river behemoth instead of the CGI sharks that are best left for the Sharknado movies. With convincing practical effects, solid underwater cinematography, gentle use of shakycam without the rigorous editing that has plagued the Hollywood landscape and a use of the Australian outback as a key character in the story, Holmes' strengths as a director really shine.

Shortly before watching Fear Below, I caught a viewing of a minimalist John Hyams psychological thriller called Alone, a simple film about a woman who is kidnapped and chased into the woods. It's a film with little dialogue and just enough character development, one that focuses instead on using its simple narrative to build as much tension as it possibly can through the director's expertise. I kept thinking back to this movie whilst watching Fear Below, noting a comparison between the strengths of the directors. Both function incredibly well with a minimalist story and a heavier emphasis on building tension, and both are skilled at making genre pieces with technical expertise and solid performances. Holmes is a budding filmmaker with an ongoing career on the horizon, and if he continues his career focusing on stories with simpler narratives and increasing the ambition of his directorial expertise, he is sure to blossom as a prominent voice in the Australian cinematic landscape. If he continues to try his hand at writing more characters and dialogue, I hope he continues to evolve and find a better rhythm in the films beyond this one.

Fear Below is one of the better shark films I've seen in a long time. It starts on a rough foot with some clunky dialogue and rushed pacing, but once it leans into its genre film roots, it finds its footing as an intense and enjoyable genre film which I'd gladly recommend to any shark film aficionado.

Fear Below" dives deep, but not in a good way. This cinematic misadventure struggles with weak direction from the get-go, betraying a clearly poor budget that haunts every frame. There are zero surprises in this predictable plot, making it a tedious watch. You barely even see the shark, which for a shark movie, is an unforgivable sin. When it does deign to appear, its size seems to fluctuate wildly - one moment it's a giant, the next it's a small, idiotic fish, completely undermining any sense of threat.

The film is riddled with stupid and flimsy solutions to its poorly constructed dilemmas, and the acting is uniformly poor. Not once do you feel any genuine emotion from the characters - no pain, no danger, no sorrow, no urgency. They're just cardboard cutouts moving through a bland, uninspired script. The villains are caricatured and unconvincing, adding another layer to the film's many failings.

Adding insult to injury, the camera work is a choppy mess, constantly employing fast cuts and hiding the action, as if ashamed of what it's trying to show. This isn't suspense; it's an attempt to mask the film's glaring inadequacies. Honestly, "Fear Below" is one of the worst films I've ever seen.

This is a bad shark movie, so I went in expecting it to be poorly acted, with a really dumb story, and for it to be cheap looking. But much to my surprise this has decent acting, an okay story, and it doesn't look too cheap. But the most important part is the sharks, and in this genre I feel it is very important that the atmosphere should either be scary or goofy. This is neither, your grandma wouldn't be scared and the effects and kills barely register. Meanwhile the characters are nothings and the story is blah.

This completely washed over me without leaving the faintest trace of an impact. I had already forgotten 95% just mere hours later. The worst kind of crappy shark movie: a non-entity.