Netflix’s Below Paris is each killer-shark film rolled up in a single

Typical knowledge says there are two methods to make a shark assault film. You’ll be able to set it at sea, the place most sharks dwell, and attempt to use character, plot, compelling motion, and perhaps over-the-top devourings to make your story really feel distinctive. Or you’ll be able to lure in viewers by placing sharks someplace nobody expects sharks — flying via the air and touchdown throughout Los Angeles! Roaming the streets of downtown New Orleans! Swimming via the snow at a ski resort! Bursting out of the bottom within the jungle! Most filmmakers who select the latter path need to abandon any sense of actuality and embrace absurdism. Netflix’s French thriller Below Paris, from Hitman director Xavier Gens, is a daring try and have all of it.

Gens and co-writers Maud Heywang and Yannick Dahan appear to need their thriller to be each a severe, considerate, character-driven film and a pulpy, gory thriller the place a CG shark converts folks into chum within the Metropolis of Gentle. That plot stretches believability at each level, however Gens refuses to cede any of the bottom round tone or realism that’s anticipated from a “shark in an unimaginable place” film. As an alternative, he slaps essentially the most severe face on it that he can.

Even so, it’s a particularly foolish and never significantly scary film.

Finest Actress Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) stars as Sophia, a marine researcher whose shark-tagging undertaking went terribly unsuitable when a mako designated as “Lilith” attacked her dive crew years in the past. Traumatized to the purpose the place she spends many of the film sporting an unchanging half-determined/half-lost expression, Sophia winds up in Paris, giving desultory aquarium lectures to bratty college teams.

Her previous resurfaces (together with a well-known fin) when fervent younger activist Mika (Léa Léviant) contacts her on behalf of a resistance group known as SOS, or Save Our Seas. Mika’s group hacks into wildlife tagging techniques to deactivate the tags so fishing boats can’t use them to hone in on animals’ areas. SOS is monitoring Lilith’s tag, and so they’ve traced her to the Seine. Mika, her hacktivist buddy Ben (Nagisa Morimoto), and their group wish to save the shark by luring it again out to the ocean. Sophia simply needs to maintain Parisians from getting eaten by a deep-sea shark they don’t count on to come across in a comparatively shallow freshwater river.

As a lot as this premise appears like cult-movie goofiness geared toward followers of trashy creature options, there may be at the very least a little bit science behind it. Sharks have been present in England’s Thames river, some shark species can navigate freshwater or transition from rivers to oceans and again, and dwindling habitats and rising international temperatures have pushed many animal species to behave in odd methods or evolve quickly to suit into new ecosystems. (The movie can also be drawing closely on latest real-world makes an attempt to detoxify the Seine so it may be used for 2024’s Olympic Video games.)

All of which makes Below Paris some of the substantive of the various aquatic-attack horror motion pictures which have tried to coast alongside within the wake of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, at the very least for many of its run time. The leads are established actors with well-earned reputations, projecting grim, soulful willpower. The cinematography is razor-sharp and fantastically lit, a standout in an period of murky filmmaking. The themes, about local weather change and generational discord, have some resonance. At almost each second, this film asks viewers to take all of it at face worth.

Gens and his co-writers don’t wish to get too egg-headed about any of the film’s particulars. At any time when a personality brings up the implausibility of an immense mako choosing off Parisians, Sophia adjustments the topic as quickly as doable, with a crisp “You didn’t query it when it was a beluga whale!” or a tossed-off remark about local weather change and evolution.

Overstuffing the script with characters and plot threads appears like the same diversion, designed to maintain folks from pondering an excessive amount of about what they’re watching. That may be one of the best rationalization for many of the scenes involving Nassim Lyes, the lead of Gens’ hard-hitting latest motion film Mayhem!, as Sgt. Adil, the chief of an eerily militarized River Brigade police drive that displays the Seine, taking down unauthorized divers and kayakers. His group, naturally, first refuses to imagine there’s a shark, then refuses to entertain the thought of rescuing it as an alternative of killing it.

A stunning proportion of Below Paris’ 101-minute run time goes towards Adil and others arguing about and attempting to show or disprove the shark’s existence. At instances, that’s a tedious course of, because the viewers already is aware of the reply. However at the very least it’s a strategy to resolve one of many largest issues most ocean-going shark assault motion pictures face: preserve getting folks again into the water, the place they will get dramatically eaten. Ultimately, although, the motion ramps up — and at that time, Gens veers sharply, abandoning seriousness and turning the film into the pulpy, over-the-top, eye-rolling shlock function he’d labored so arduous to keep away from.

If you wish to outline the “two methods to make a shark film” break up alongside a fair less complicated axis, you might additionally say that the essential paths are “Copycat Jaws for all you’re price” and “Do actually the rest.” Once more, Below Paris has it each methods. At first, Gens and firm construct distinctive characters and chart their very own path. Then they introduce the Huge Essential Worldwide Swim Occasion that’s about to happen within the Seine, and the mercenary, gained’t-hear-reason mayor who refuses to cancel it simply because folks preserve getting killed. Abruptly, the film appears like a pale echo of Spielberg’s masterpiece, following its playbook line by line, proper right down to the compulsory scene the place Sophia makes a dramatic discovery throughout a shark post-mortem.

However when the inevitable massacre begins, Below Paris appears to be cribbing from a lot messier shark assault motion pictures as an alternative: an unlikely bisection of a diver straight out of Deep Blue Sea, combined in with Piranha 3D’s barrage of over-the-top CG water motion. All of which leaves Below Paris feeling like a slapdash try and seize each doable viewers without delay, in a means that doesn’t totally serve any of them.

None of this odd tone-shifting, copycatting, or narrative overcrowding would matter if Below Paris was tense, horrifying, and interesting. Scientists and researchers complain that the countless stream of killer-shark motion pictures has pushed irrational worry of animals that usually simply aren’t that harmful, but it surely appears pure sufficient for viewers to keep up a fascination and dread round primordial killers that almost all victims won’t ever see coming. Killer-shark motion pictures — of each the winkingly ridiculous “land sharks gone wild” selection and the at the very least barely believable ones — will preserve getting made so long as folks bear in mind their first expertise watching Jaws and hope to recreate that thrilling pressure.

However no matter what mode filmmakers lean into for a shark film, they should convey one thing worthwhile to that mode. Below Paris will get about midway there on each entrance — drama, thrills, terror, character battle, humanity-versus-nature messaging — and never a lot additional than that. It’s a movie destined to be outpaced inside a yr by its personal “each shark assault in Below Paris” YouTube supercut, when somebody realizes how straightforward it will be to whittle this distracted, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film right down to a a lot less complicated expertise geared toward a a lot less complicated viewers.

Below Paris is streaming on Netflix now.