Beneath. 2013. USA. Directed by Larry Fessenden. Screenplay by Tony Daniel, Brian D. Smith. With Bonnie Dennison, Daniel Zovatto, Jon Orsini. DCP. 90 min.
In his ingenious mashup of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Joe Dante’s Piranha, and Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, Fessenden finds endlessly inventive ways of spoiling a camping reunion of ruthlessly selfish, horny teenagers cast adrift on a lake of (g)ill repute. Eric Kohn of Indiewire observes, “After a while, the lake itself takes on allegorical dimensions, the survivors trapped in an amoral purgatory of their own making in which virtually all allegiances fade in favor of cold, Darwinian logic. ‘I wanted to make it very, very spare,’ Fessenden [has said,] ‘almost classical.’” Courtesy IFC Films