The Reef

Released By: Momentum Pictures
Price: £15.99
Availability: Out 24th January 2011

On viewing The Reef, it might be fair to wonder if director Andrew Traucki has issues with nature or simply the holidaymakers who don’t pay enough attention to it. In his last film, Black Water, he stranded a family in the trees of a half-submerged mango swamp in Northern Australia and had them menaced by a lurking, very patient crocodile. In his latest film, The Reef, the formula is similar, though this time his maritime characters/victims find themselves menaced by a lurking, very patient great white shark.

Four friends decide sail out across the Great Barrier Reef when one of them, Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling, of acclaimed Australian drama Underbelly), is hired to deliver the sailing boat to a new customer. He’s a reasonably experienced sailor, but with added local crew-member Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith) it simply seems like a welcome break for everyone. However - as things are wont -  those things quickly go awry when the boat’s hull touches the bottom and is broken by sharp coral, the boat capsizing. With only a weak emergency signal and the boat likely to sink at any moment, everybody but Warren decides to kick off from the boat and head towards an island that Luke believes is around ten miles over the horizon.

Also not dissimilar in tone and execution to Chris Kentis’ 2003 also ‘inspired by a true story’ drama Open Water, this is a decent thriller, full of requisite tension and mood and fateful decisions that may or may not pay off along the way. The benefit of a relatively unknown cast - and not the usual American movie-of-the-week faces - is that you’re not predisposed to root for any particular member to survive longer than another, though a brief knowledge of group-dynamic thrillers would help you hazard a good guess at the pecking/munching/gnawing order.

And there in lies The Reef’s only real problem - survival thrillers are fairly interchangeable and while Traucki is a deft hand at all the needed ingredients, anyone who DID see Black Water or Open Water will recognise many of the requisite beats. Equally, and I know I’m nit-picking here - having been lucky enough to be on the Great Barrier Reef myself, it may be expansive and desolate (as much as beautiful and attractive in parts), but I’m also aware that you can usually still get an amazingly good mobile-phone signal - a communications device that has hobbled the thriller genre..  ‘True story’ is always a subjective choice of claim and one suspects a huge amount of artistic license has been taken to give the film a familiar packaged plot, the dynamics echoing a formula, but there’s still no denying that with a healthy suspension of disbelief, the actors give it their all and Traucki knows how to put the scares into scuba.

The ‘scariest shark thriller since Jaws!’ as the cover blurb boasts? Well, no, maybe not. But this is a competent, effective and interesting purchase/rental if you’re up for a change of pace and mood from the usual blockbuster. The Reef may ultimately flounder slightly on familiarity, but it’s nice to see an atmospheric movie that isn’t purely a CGI or slasher flick. Just perhaps avoid any aquatic vacationing with Traucki any time soon.

8/10
John Mosby