The shallows: official trailer

The film was released in the United States on June 24, 2016 by Columbia Pictures, received generally positive reviews from critics, and has grossed over $70 million.

Plot

The film opens with a young boy kicking a soccer ball along the shore of a beach. He finds a GoPro camera attached to a helmet washed up on the surf which he picks up. The video on the GoPro is of a man struggling to get out of the water and onto a reef only to be dragged under and killed by an enormous shark.

Shortly after the death of her mother, medical student Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) travels to a secluded beach in Mexico to surf, which is also the same beach her mother surfed at after finding out she was pregnant with Nancy many years before. Nancy gets a ride to the beach from Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), a friendly local resident, who refuses to tell her the beach’s name, saying only that it is paradise. After arriving at the beach, Nancy joins two other local residents, and the three surf for several hours.

Taking a break from surfing, Nancy video-chats her sister Chloe (Sedona Legge) to let her know that she is surfing at their mother’s beach. When she talks to her father (Brett Cullen), it is revealed that her mother’s death has caused Nancy to consider dropping out of medical school. The conversation becomes emotional and strained, and Nancy hangs up to catch one more wave in the late afternoon before heading back to her hotel. While waiting for a wave, Nancy notices a largehumpback whale carcass floating about twenty yards away. While riding a wave back to the beach, a large great white shark bumps her surf board, causing her to fall and hit her head on a submerged rock formation. As she surfaces to her board, the shark bites her leg, pulling her under. Nancy crawls onto the whale carcass, where she stays until the shark rams it from underneath. Nancy swims to an isolated reef, where she places a tourniquet on her leg to stop the bleeding. The two locals depart, unaware of Nancy’s situation, leaving Nancy to spend the night on the reef with a wounded seagull, whom she names Steven, after Steven Seagal.

The next morning, Nancy sees a drunk local man passed out on the beach. She gets his attention, but he proceeds to steal her phone, money, and backpack. After noticing her surfboard floating in shallow water, he wades out to retrieve it, only to be torn in half by the shark. Several hours later, the two locals Nancy had surfed with the day before return. They get into the water before Nancy can warn them away, and both are killed by the shark. Nancy retrieves one of the men’s GoPro camera helmet, and after another close attack from the shark, records a message for her father and sister, and then throws the helmet toward the shore.

With high tide approaching, Nancy knows the reef will be submerged soon. After sending Steven Seagull onto the other half of her surfboard and timing the shark’s circles from the whale carcass to the reef, Nancy swims to a nearby buoy, narrowly avoiding the shark by swimming through a group of jellyfish, which sting both the shark and Nancy. Nancy is able to find a flare gun on the buoy, but cannot catch the attention of a passing cargo ship farther out to sea. Nancy shoots at the shark, which catches on fire because of all the whale blubber in the water. The shark begins furiously attacking the buoy, ripping out one of the chains securing it to the ocean bed. Nancy grabs onto the remaining chain. When it also breaks, she lets it pull her down to the ocean floor. The shark pursues Nancy down as fast as possible and is killed when it impales itself on the metal rods of the buoy’s mooring.

The GoPro camera is found floating near the shore by Carlos’ son (the boy kicking the soccer ball from the beginning) who brings his father to the beach. Carlos then finds Nancy floating in the shallows as his son runs for help.

One year later, Nancy and Chloe are going surfing in Galveston, Texas as her father tells her that her mother would have been proud.

Production

Initially Louis Leterrier was to direct, although he dropped out in June 2015, leading to Jaume Collet-Serra being considered for the job. Blake Lively joined the cast in August 2015. Lively was partly inspired by her husband, Ryan Reynolds’, work in the similarly minimalist film Buried, stating “that was one of the reasons why I wanted to take on this movie so much, because I know how tough that was for him and how rewarding it was.

Filming

Principal photography on the film began on October 28, 2015 in New South Wales, Australia.^[ Filming also took place at Lord Howe Island. It originally was going to be filmed on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Galveston, but the filmmakers got denied a film permit for safety reasons.

Source: Wikipedia