“Jaws,” the movie that did for sharks what “Psycho” did for showers, was rooted in the primal fear that drove its famous opening scene: the terror of having your body shredd…
“Jaws,” the movie that did for sharks what “Psycho” did for showers, was rooted in the primal fear that drove its famous opening scene: the terror of having your body shredded by razory teeth and engulfed in a great white gullet. In its limb-shearing way, it caught the fear of getting sucked into a tiny abyss. Yet part of the power of “Jaws” is that it was also an adventure drama of thrillingly wide-open space. The anxiety was dark and concentrated, the seascape enticing and vast.
But the movies made in the shadow of “Jaws” have tended to be waterlogged chamber thrillers. “Open Water,” released in 2003, was easily the most ingenious of them. It was like the opening scene of “Jaws” extended to 90 minutes — and amazingly, the director, Chris Kentis, sustained the tension. No other “Jaws” knockoff has been half as good. And more often than not, the cramped-space aesthetic now rules.
To the extent that “Uncaged” has a story, it’s about how Mia , who has been living with her marine-archaeologist father , her stepmother , and her stepsister, Sasha , on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, acts out the alienation she’s feeling by skipping out on a glass-bottom-boat tour and following Sasha and two friends — i.e., the only mean girls in school who don’t completely despise her — on an afternoon of playing hooky.
What they don’t count on is the decaying columns that come crashing down, the labyrinth of catacombs that disorient and entrap them, and the gigantic shark, with a scarred hide that bespeaks years of hungry slicing through the rough seas, that’s swimming around the premises. Its open mouth is fearsome, its body has the power of a torpedo, and it will shoot right at you if you’re directly in front of it; it not, it will move forward, oblivious.
At times, this tale of four young women trying to rescue each other in an underwater maze — as opposed to the two caged vacation divers of “47 Meters Down” — suggests a variation on “The Descent,” the 2005 spelunking thriller. It takes a lot of chops to shoot the majority of a movie underwater, and Johannes Roberts is a skillful crafter of images; he sets one eerie sequence to the echoey sounds of “We’ve Only Just Begun.
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