Production trends in Australian cinema blow strong every few years with the promise of commercial deliverance and then peter out, only for the movement to alight on a new direction and set off again. Over the past two decades we’ve had the suburban whimsy engendered by Muriel’s Wedding and that forgettable string of idiot comedies that included Takeaway and You and Your Stupid Mate. The current clamour is for narrowly focused genre flicks that appear to draw most of their thematic drive from the always durable horror field; it couldn’t hope to be further away from the indie aesthetic of crumpled families and their wayward sons arguing their way through a reunion.
Local filmmaker Andrew Traucki, who has form in the genre field with the 2007 killer croc flick Black Water, returns to the fold with The Reef, a tersely clean genre work that may well best serve to show how the narrowing and tamping down of cinematic instincts to make something deliberately lean and accessible can only take you so far. The story of four people who swim for safety above the Great Barrier Reef and are steadily picked off by an implacable great white shark, the film is good at what it does, goes to plan and concludes in a modest 88 minutes. Yet if that’s success, it’s also a failing, for it’s not particularly memorable or distinctive. It’s decent, and perhaps we should desire more.
Traucki’s guiding ethos appears to be to cut back and edit down – he appears distrustful of excess. On a broader level that means The Reef is more of an exercise in suspense than gore – it’s not as bloody as you might guess. But he also keeps the location and dialogue tight, to the point where it is virtually workmanlike. Not a lot is said besides the basic establishment of character when Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) meets his friend Matt (Gyton Grantley) at a regional airport, along with Matt’s girlfriend, Suzie (Adrienne Pickering), and Matt’s sister and Luke’s not entirely resolved ex-girlfriend, Kate (Zoe Naylor).
Luke, by virtue of his experience and access to the boat they’re getting to holiday on while it’s delivered to Indonesia, is the alpha male, with Matt the jovial sidekick. But once they’re in the water after the boat capsizes and slowly starts to sink, nothing changes in the dynamic. Luke wants to swim over the horizon, to the safety of nearby land, and they follow him, despite the warnings of the boat’s hired hand, Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith), that sharks haunt the waters. Panic over the creature, which begins all too soon for the quartet, erases any possibility of recrimination or division. The seemingly endless sea becomes a kind of banal setting, as aside from some underwater photography, Traucki can’t really apply a change in perspective.
There are some chilling moments, such as a dead body floating serenely in the water suddenly being dragged under as the shark finishes its business, but without any defences or change of scenery beyond a brief stop on a miniscule outcropping of rock, the movie becomes somewhat repetitive; a fin is sighted, fear percolates, Luke puts on his mask and lowers his head to watch for the shark’s approach, someone may or may not be savaged. That kind of unrelenting dread is an interesting tool on the screen, but it’s not particularly worthwhile if it doesn’t reveal, or open up, something more within the protagonists or setting.
The shark tries to eat the protagonists, while they in turn try to make it safety. The Reef achieves a reasonable threshold, but I’m not entirely sure what separates it from dramatised scenes shot for the kind of Discovery Channel show that routinely recreates these nightmares of the natural world.
