MOVIE REVIEW

Below  (2002)

Starring: Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams
Director: David Twohy

Rating: R

Studio: Dimension Films

Review Posted: 10.18.02

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara Michelle Fetters.

"Below Surfaces as a Winning Thriller"

Back at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival, I was allowed a few moments with the great Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. He was being honored as one of that year’s “Emerging Masters” and I met up with him after a screening of his fabulously scary ghost story Séance.

It was a ghost story where the ghost in question is hardly seen and does almost nothing, yet every moment it’s on the screen you can feel the rigid tension filter through the audience. “I find the idea of a ghost that does nothing absolutely terrifying,” Kurosawa told me. “Hopefully, the audience will feel the same.”

I get the feeling director David Twohy does. His Below is one of the scariest, most intense ghostly tales in a long time. Yet the ghost in question hardly lifts a finger and the unhinged human protagonists do most of the damage. It also helps that the film works on more levels than just a B-grade ghost story. Twohy, along with co-screenwriters Lucas Sussman and Darren Aronofsky, have crafted that rare bird of haunted house tale where plausibility isn’t a tea China and credibility isn’t a concept only the foreign legion would care about.

By setting their tale on a wounded submarine cruising through the waters of the North Atlantic, Twohy and company have solved the great problem inherent in most stories revolving around a haunting; why don’t those being afflicted just leave the gosh darn house? Well, you can’t really leave a submarine 250 feet below the surface of the ocean, especially when there is a German Destroyer cruising above you intent on putting you at the bottom of it.

That is the very problem facing the USS Tiger Shark, a World War II sub prowling mid-Atlantic waters. After losing their captain in a mysterious accident, the sub rescues three survivors, including one female nurse named Claire (Olivia Williams, Rushmore and The Sixth Sense), recently set adrift after the sinking of their medical frigate by a submarine.

What the survivors don’t know is that the Tiger Shark is cursed with an ethereal presence bringing hardship upon the boat and its crew. Lt. Brice (Bruce Greenwood, Thirteen Days), now in command after the captain’s disappearance, tries to maintain order amongst his crew as the sub slowly falls apart due to the constant pounding of the German Destroyer above and with the ghoulish specter sabotaging all attempts at repair below. Brice is also battling personal demons and they may or may not be intimately intertwined with the sub’s current predicament. As the chain of command breaks down due to unexplained death or mental deterioration, it’s up to Ensign Odell (Matt Davis, Blue Crush) to solve the riddling clues left by the ghost and save the ship before everyone aboard dies of hydrogen narcosis or something much, much worse.

The glory of Below is, despite its seeming complexity, it is actually a fairly simple ghostly mystery dropped into a harrowingly human wartime context. The peril inherent in submarine warfare is already terrifying enough, but mixed with a ghost that may be out for revenge the seeds of a surprisingly tense tale are all in place.

Granted, while Twohy whips things up into an increasingly tense and believably frenzy, he rushes the conclusion much too fast. And, despite the uniformly fine performances and steady direction, it is a little hard to get past the fact that Below is little more than a solid B-movie.

But so what? Twohy’s gentle hand and the films economic screenplay are real winners. There is more tension in the first twenty minutes of Below than most thrillers of this type can muster for an entire run time (Swimfan, anyone?) and it’s always nice to find a film that assumes its audience has more than half a brain. The USS Tiger Shark may be sinking, but this film certainly isn’t.

Rating: 3 out of 4

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