Review of Below (2002) by Captain_Chaos — 26 Sep 2018

Although it massively tanked at the box office, you need only look at the average user review to see that Below is a movie worth at least checking out. It's a film that not only has an interesting premise that it uses to the best effect it can, it also gives me some small hope that perhaps, horror cinema is not doomed to be a relic of decades past, condemned to "hackneyed torture porn" as another reviewer here put it.

In 1943 somewhere in the Atlantic, a US submarine called the Tiger Shark receives orders to pick up survivors from a sunk English hospital ship.

These survivors, one of which is a woman, are convinced that a German U-boat is responsible for the sinking of their vessel. The Tiger Shark is soon forced to dive and is subsequently menaced by the depth charges and drag hooks of a German destroyer.

Having seen both submarine and jump scare horror movies before, Below does not subvert most expectations. But the combination of these two genres makes for very effective presentation and storytelling. There's also a large number of "hey it's that guy" actors with good performances, and suspension of disbelief is overall quite easy to maintain. Some reviewers say the acting comes off as anachronistic, that the movie could have been set in another era, but I disagree- the backdrop of the second world war and the specter of Nazi military power greatly enhances the impact of many films, whether they incorporate supernatural elements or not. In particular, I could not help but compare Below briefly to a film from two years earlier, U-571, to which I find this film largely superior.

The Tiger Shark suffers an admittedly high number of near-catastrophic incidents, each reasonably attributable to mechanical failure, and the crew's floundering morale and audiovisual hallucinations attributable to CO2 poisoning as well as past incidents on their voyage, and yet, you are never really sure if that's the case. IS there a U-boat out there somewhere in the cold depths hounding the Tiger Shark, or is it something else? The ocean is a strange, vast and scary place, after all.