Steven Spielberg’s Jaws? The Shallows? Sharknado? Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark? Check. Xavier Gens’ shark-in-Paris movie bridges the gap between shark thrillers.
Conventional wisdom says there are two ways to make a shark attack movie. You can set it at sea, where most sharks live, and try to use character, plot, compelling action, and maybe over-the-top devourings to make your story feel unique. Or you can lure in viewers by putting sharks somewhere no one expects sharks — flying through the air and landing all over Los Angeles! Roaming the streets of downtown New Orleans! Swimming through the snow at a ski resort! Bursting out of the ground in the jungle! Most filmmakers who choose the latter path have to abandon any sense of reality and embrace absurdism. Netflix’s French thriller Under Paris, from Hitman director Xavier Gens, is a bold attempt to have it all.
Gens and co-writers Maud Heywang and Yannick Dahan seem to want their thriller to be both a serious, thoughtful, character-driven movie and a pulpy, gory thriller where a CG shark converts people into chum in the City of Light. That plot stretches believability at every point, but Gens refuses to cede any of the ground around tone or realism that’s expected from a “shark in an impossible place” movie. Instead, he slaps the most serious face on it that he can.
Even so, it’s an extremely silly and not particularly scary movie.
Best Actress Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) stars as Sophia, a marine researcher whose shark-tagging project went terribly wrong when a mako designated as “Lilith” attacked her dive crew years ago. Traumatized to the point where she spends most of the movie wearing an unchanging half-determined/half-lost expression, Sophia winds up in Paris, giving desultory aquarium lectures to bratty school groups.
Her past resurfaces (along with a familiar fin) when fervent young activist Mika (Léa Léviant) contacts her on behalf of a resistance group called SOS, or Save Our Seas. Mika’s team hacks into wildlife tagging systems to deactivate the tags so fishing boats can’t use them to hone in on animals’ locations. SOS is tracking Lilith’s tag, and they’ve traced her to the Seine. Mika, her hacktivist friend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto), and their group want to save the shark by luring it back out to the ocean. Sophia just wants to keep Parisians from getting eaten by a deep-sea shark they don’t expect to encounter in a relatively shallow freshwater river.
As much as this premise feels like cult-movie goofiness aimed at fans of trashy creature features, there is at least a little science behind it.
