UNDERWATER

Release date: January 10, 2020 (USA)
Director: William Eubank
Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie, and T.J. Miller.
Screenplay: Adam Cozad, Brian Duffield
Music: Marco Beltrami

Well, well––besides being a pretty deep subject, looky here it is the start of 2020 and what better way to kick things off than a movie review (or two) from me, considering, after all, I am living in the back lot of Tinsel Town. So, let’s get right to it, shall we? UNDERWATER directed by William Eubank (Love, The Signal) wow, what better claustrophobic, nails-down-a-blackboard, deeply derivative, loosely character driven ‘who-let-the-monster’s-out’ type feature-flick could I hope for to hash things-out? And yes, also, my ‘official’ first, bonafide theatrical viewing of MMXX.

Now, of course, I would normally be very, very tempted to look-back to make mention of the profoundly impactful works of late 2019 (Parasite, The Great Hack, Uncut Gems) that is, if I all I wanted to pontificate upon was substance, metaphor, as well as everything else that brings the best of the cinematic experience to the forefront of my being. But then, how could I stop there without going further into the unexpected social relevance and cultural importance of films I’d seen over the past year such as The Last Blackman In San Francisco, Hustlers, Queen & Slim and yea, even The Lighthouse in its own kinda-twisty-slimmy way.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon how one looks at it, though––this brings us all right-back to the twisted slime at hand––that of Eubank’s UNDERWATER. As a Gen-X, the one big takeaway I got from this film is encapsulated in the following thought: the single most problematic of all Hollywood tropes exists only to give rise to new cinematic genius (aka Jordan Peele, Us) so that we can be reminded of why those tropes arose in the first place (spoiler alert, yes, the black guy implodes (dies) first)––yet I suppose if that’s 'the' message you as a 2020 filmmaker are signaling (using a failed trope as a post-modernist-ish commentary on using failed tropes) so be it, job well done––I guess.

Yet, all this bio-political, socio economic jargon aside, UNDERWATER still strikes a nearly-parable-like tone (ie. were we not all underwater with the weight of the world as we entered the theater?) with assists mostly from the acting prowess of Kristen Stewart and the more unsettling bits of the ‘almost-too-much-comic-relief’ style of T.J. Miller. As much as it re-hashed all to familiar territory the screenplay by Cozad & Duffield seemed almost 'fresh' if not well adapted. The sometimes wildly crazed 70's-style-electronic musical score by Marco Beltrami––set the mood for mesmerizing, foreboding and, even at times, reverential atmosphere of this surprisingly well crafted feature.

The film's overall success, in my eye, was not for lack of creature-feature-spills-n-chills, but rather Eubank’s cleverness in overtly sublimating (let’s call it for what it is) the ALIEN genre as a shimmering example of something new among other countless dime-a-dozen shameless appropriations of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Muthur of all sci-fi epic morality tales (where key ingredients of time, space, female leads, gnarly monsters & corporate greed coalesce into a cohesive-narrative-thrill-ride that defies convention, or at least attempts to, by up-ending deeply rooted, megalomaniacal cast/belief systems to remind us that, in the end, we’re all left standing in the same head-count-line-up with no place to run and time-on the clock done run out). 

That plus, cinematically, UNDERWATER's uber grunge style of visual chaos set against translucent slime and murky darkness ran un-distracted on this quite palatable parallel track right down to the blue of Yaphet Koto’s (ALIEN’s Parker) bandana––not an easy task to pull off, for this movie goer though, it seemed, well––well worth the effort. 

kp