Movie Review: Underwater

By Ryan Grow | January 13, 2020

Underwater submerges Kristen Stewart into an aquatic Alien showdown. 

Director William Eubank’s new horror film Underwater might feel a bit familiar to some audiences: Mysterious creatures terrorize crew members aboard a research station located seven miles below the surface of the ocean. It’s definitely a mild version of Ridley Scott’s space-horror movie Alien, but instead of space, audiences are now plunged to the bottom of the ocean. 

Underwater wastes no time in delivering its anxiety-inducing terror. The film starts out with its only quiet moment as Norah (Kristen Stewart) is brushing her teeth in an underwater research lab when water starts crashing through the walls in waves like speeding bullets. The scale of destruction is undeniably impressive.

And it doesn’t stop there as the captain comes up with a Hail Mary plan: They will have to walk across the bottom of the ocean to reach the project’s Roebuck drill station, where they can take shelter and get to the surface. But things get even more disastrous once they venture to the ocean floor. 

 The action does suffer a bit due to the darkness of the deep-sea setting In sequences when more than one character is dressed in diving suits, they start to blend together and almost gets hard to tell who is who. But cinematographer Bojan Bazelli manages to make it still look pretty amazing. Individual scenes are shown in eerie green and blue colors, and the final reveal, as monsters, seems to just jump out of the darkness, are impressively creepy. 

Kristen Stewart continues to prove that she is a very watchable actress. She’s the deep-sea version of Alien’s Ripley and gets the most to work with compared to the rest of the cast. She brings everything she has to her performance to project fear, determination, and desperation. 

Underwater pretty much a deep-sea version of Alien but still has enough originality to be an intensely entertaining movie. It doesn’t ask us to put up our disbelief so much as it squashes them, then bludgeons it. And it all kind of works. Anything seems possible down there.

Critic Rating: 4/5 stars

What did you think of the film? Sound off in the comments.