47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

Score: 3 / 5

Trapped in a ruined, underwater city with blind, ravenous sharks? Yes please!

The sequel (that really isn't a sequel at all) to 47 Meters Down shares a title with its predecessor even though the characters are almost certainly not that far down. They are, however, notably "uncaged" as the subtitle declares, if you don't count the crumbling walls and pillars and ceilings of a temple where Central American natives made blood sacrifices as a cage. Whereas the original film straddled a disturbing line between an agoraphobic ocean floor and a claustrophobic sense of darkness and pressure, Uncaged is so claustrophobic it would have been scary enough without the sharks.

Terrible title aside, this movie's fabulously absurd premise -- like so many horror movies -- makes for an effective thrill ride. It's one of those where almost everything that could go wrong does, and you're giggling even as you gasp. A group of young women, alone in an idyllic lagoon that nobody knows about, decide to utilize some scuba gear and investigate the antechamber of the underwater Mayan temple. Of course, they'll just circle around once and come back out, right? That's the plan, until one of them chases a strange-looking fish around a pillar. It screams at her -- yes, the damned thing screams -- and it's so weird and funny I almost forgot what movie I was watching. In her fright, the woman collapses the pillar, separating the girls in blinding sediment and blocking their escape route.

Apparently the collapse also attracts (perhaps opens the way) for predators as well, as suddenly the shape of a great white looms large in the confined space. It's remarkably scary, seeing a gaping maw of jagged teeth approaching you in the dark tunnels with hardly any wiggle room. And while the sharks are, by nature, frightening, these sharks have some additional spooky qualities. Having apparently gone blind in their hellish tunnels, the sharks seem to have a heightened sense of hearing. At least so the pitiful dialogue proclaims multiple times, attributing it to evolution (though I don't think that's how the process works). I had hoped this element would turn the film into a sort of underwater version of Don't Breathe, but it doesn't.

Lost opportunities aside, the film plays out instead like The Descent, if with a larger budget and more spectacular delivery. Director Johannes Roberts has a knack for weird, interesting, and funny images that are also quite disturbing, and they blast out here in full force. My favorite includes a scene in which the women, having found John Corbett's "Dad" character, follow him to an escape route: another isolated sinkhole with a rope to climb. Of course the exhausted girls will have trouble ascending, but when the sharks begin to circle beneath them, one panics and -- a magnificent moment -- flips upside down on the rope so that her head falls into the water and she screams as the shark approaches.

It all gets really weird before it's over, including the completely bonkers inclusion of an underwater whirlpool -- remember, we're supposed to be in a submerged temple -- and I worried briefly we'd have a subterranean sharknado. But the weirdness works if you just let it take you, and we end up with a really fun ride. It could have leaned into its own absurdity more, but isn't that true of all of us?

The Book Thief (2013)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I finally saw this war drama, which I don't think had a wide theatrical release, and fell madly in love. It's not what I expected, and it's not really an original landmark, but it's really, truly lovely. Especially notable is John Williams's score, which skillfully heightens the drama without drawing much attention to itself (a feat John Williams has not been able to do in his frequent Spielberg collaborations).

We follow young Liesel (Sophie Nelisse), adopted into a German family as the Nazis rise to power. Over the course of four years, she learns fear, bravery, and love through her experiences, and, perhaps most importantly, she learns to read. Taught by her foster father (Geoffrey Rush), she actively learns to read and write on her basement walls before creatively spinning tales of her own to comfort the shaken community during air raids. Though integrated into the Hitler Youth, Liesel remains curious and open-minded: She deliberately reads books after seeing the Nazis burn them, and she quickly befriends and protects Max, a Jewish refugee hiding in her home.

I have several reasons for liking this film, and most of them are purely reactionary. By that, I mean I don't have a lot of high-brow Thoughts about The Book Thief, because it is almost shockingly simple and sweet in its delivery. It seems to have no grand delusions of its own importance (which makes it profoundly important, I might add), and indeed it often feels like a child's fantasy. Gentle and even whimsical, the film runs to a slow pace and a palpable heartbeat. That's not to say it is trivial or unsentimental; it is certainly weighted with its thematic content and the contexts of racial, gendered, political, social, and intellectual oppression of Nazi Germany. One of the main discussion points for me is the voice-over narrator (Roger Allam), who represents Death. This is a fantastic concept, a relatively original cinematic device, and a complicated rhetorical move in an otherwise optimistic film, all wrapped up into one.

Though danger and death threaten our protagonists at every turn, nothing seems to quench Liesel's hope, which sometimes makes this film feel a bit like a re-imagining of Anne Frank's famous narrative. Indeed, Liesel's ultimate penning of a diary makes the film more of a comedy in the traditional sense of the word (in which the plot is generally hopeful, or "upward", rather than "downward", as in a tragedy). The greatest warmth and charm of the film are provided by Geoffrey Rush in his typical brilliance, though his character's wife (played perfectly by Emily Watson) brings her own big-hearted presence to the tale.

Director Roger Allam, though, deserves the most credit for this venture. His undeterred efforts to make the film hopeful and warm pay off magnificently in just about every scene. He smartly shows us an awful possibility -- hints at the worst of what we could imagine -- and then allows his characters to persevere, which makes the results of each scene almost as shocking as the horrors we might otherwise expect, but in a positive way. Make no mistake, this is a wartime drama. But there is very little violence, no battle sequence, and even the deaths of main characters (I'm really not spoiling anything, I promise) aren't really devastating. All in all, The Book Thief is one of the most unpredictable dramas I've ever seen, and its sentimental heart never succumbs to melodrama. It's just beautiful.

IMDb: The Book Thief