Synopsis: Best friends Emma and Lani, attending a destination wedding in Thailand, find themselves trapped on a sinking tour boat in the heart of a tiger shark sanctuary.
Stars: Francesca Eastwood, Dani Oliveros, Alexander Wraith, Ta’imua, Calan Scherer, Destiny Benner
Director: Phil Volken
Rated: NR
Running Length: 87 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Fifty-one years after Jaws broke down on set and made movie history anyway, Hollywood still can’t build a shark that scares anyone, and The Bay proves it again in water shallow enough to stand up in.
The Bay Review: Fifty-One Years and Still No Better Shark
The shark in Jaws broke down constantly. Steven Spielberg had to shoot around it, and the fear lived in that gap. Fifty-one years later we’ve got photoreal dragons, de-aged movie stars, and entire cities conjured out of nothing. And still, we cannot build a convincing shark. In half a century of effects miracles, nobody has improved on a rubber fish that didn’t work.
The imitators keep coming anyway, and their titles read like a dare: Sharktopus, Ghost Shark, House Shark, 6-Headed Shark Attack, Sharkuterie, Avalanche Sharks. One of those I made up, and the fact that you can’t immediately tell which is the truest measure of where this subgenre lives. Most of them lean into the joke because the joke is cheaper than fear. The rare ones that play it straight, like The Bay, run into the same wall the genre has been hitting since 1975: the audience has to believe in the animal, and the animal has never once held up its end.
A Wedding, a Boat, and a Bait Chain
Emma (Francesca Eastwood, Old) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends in Thailand for a destination wedding. A conversation at the buffet table gets them onto an eco-tour boat bound for a remote tiger shark sanctuary. Captain Mandal (Alexander Wraith) and his boatman Ruhan (Ta’imua) promise a feeding. A large female shark gets tangled in the bait chain, rams the motor, and the boat starts going down. The life raft holds one. I’ll let you do the math on the rest.
The Water Is Right There
Credit where it’s owed. Writer-director Phil Volken holds the first attack until past the midpoint and fills that runway with actual character work plus a few well-composed frames that land as genuinely frightening. There are a few jolts. The restraint is real, and it’s more than most of these bother with.
Then there’s the logic, which sinks faster than the boat. Long stretches put the stranded passengers in water they could stand upright in, with shore a few hundred yards off, and when they have the most chance to make a breast stroke to shore, nobody kicks. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and every subsequent scare has to fight through that. A shark movie can survive a bad shark. It cannot survive a swimmable distance to safety.
Volken also asks whether the sharks or the humans are the real monsters, then answers it by having Ruhan panic and become the boat’s biggest threat. It’s a stock character type in these movies. It also makes the ensemble’s only Indigenous member the moral weak link while the three Americans stay brave and selfless. Ta’imua is Hawaiian rather than Thai, and The Bay shot off Oahu, so he ends up carrying that representation twice over. Quite a choice.
Fins Like Mushroom Slices
There’s supposedly an animatronic shark in this movie, built by the effects house Bischoff’s, and I honestly could not tell you where it appears. Nearly all of it read as CGI to me, unless the practical build got beefed up so heavily in post that it stopped looking practical.
It doesn’t help that cinematographer Helge Gerull is shooting paradise. The sandy-bottom cove and clear water look less like a death trap than like a screensaver. The fins do generate some menace, though they keep changing size and shape until they resemble a cross-section of a mushroom cutting through the surface. Volken does get a few wide shots of fins circling the boat to land, and those perspective shots do the useful work of explaining why the group stays put.
Composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds decent aural cover for the softer emotional beats. Editors Richard Mazikowski and Thom Newell do their darndest to cut in a frenzy that was never really there in the first place. Some of the peril is believable. Most of it isn’t.
Twenty-Three Executive Producers Walk Onto a Boat
The Bay carries twenty-three credited executive producers, and that number tells you a great deal about how these movies get financed and almost nothing about how they get made. Volken has built a genuine niche in open-water thrillers, from Extortion to Dead Sea, and he brought a familiar crew along.
Here’s another reason this film exists. Eastwood and Wraith are married in real life. I didn’t know that going in but I picked up on something between them anyway, not chemistry exactly, more like mutual permission to go bigger. Eastwood, daughter of Clint and Frances Fisher, is much the better dialer-backer, and she comes close to becoming the plucky heroine this thing needed. Wraith is reaching for a swagger that never quite settles into place.
Part of that may be that Mandal is written like the tanned, shirtless bo-ho guy who steals somebody’s girlfriend in the second act of a romantic comedy, all gleaming teeth and shaking boat keys with unearned confidence. Part of it may be that his name sounds like a man’s shoe, and once that occurs to you, every attempt at menace arrives with a faint laugh behind it. Ta’imua is the more intriguing presence, and every scene that’s just Eastwood and Oliveros has an easy-going edge to it.
Where This Lands in the Food Chain
So chalk The Bay up as one more picture chasing the 51-year shadow of Jaws and coming up well short of the granddaddy of the summer blockbuster. It’s better than the recently released Chum, which was putrid. It’s less engaging than Netflix’s Thrash. It’s nowhere near as inventive as Hungry, and yes, that’s the killer hippo movie, and yes, it deserves mentioning as often as humanly possible because it was such a pleasant surprise.
Half a century ago, a broken rubber shark taught Hollywood that what you don’t show matters more than what you do. The Bay shows you everything, in clear water and gorgeous light, and proves the lesson all over again from the wrong side of it. A better shark movie was available. There always is.
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