At Issue with Open Water

This film is written and directed by Chris Kentis and co-produced by his wife Laura Lau.  For for a positively meager $130,000 budget, it has a running tally of nearly 55,000,000 at the box office.  Not bad, at all.  It is based on the unsolved mystery of what happened to a diver couple:

It's a diver's worst nightmare: Miles from shore, you surface to find your charter boat nowhere in sight. You call for help, but there's no response. There are no outcroppings to hold on to. You hope that someone realizes their mistake before it's too late.

This is what presumably happened to Eileen and Tom Lonergan on January 25, 1998, at St. Crispin's Reef, a popular dive site on the Great Barrier Reef, 25 miles off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Lonergans, diving veterans from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had gone out with the Port Douglas, Queensland-based scuba boat Outer Edge. Stories vary, but at the end of the day, the crew did a head count and came up with only 24 of their 26 clients. Someone pointed out two young divers who had jumped in to swim off the bow, and the crew, assuming that they had missed them, adjusted the count to 26. With the swimmers on board, the Outer Edge headed back to port.

Two days later, Geoffrey Nairn, the boat's skipper, discovered Eileen and Tom's personal belongings in the Outer Edge's lost-property bin, including Tom's wallet, glasses, and clothes. Concerned, he called the owner of the Gone Walkabout Hostel, in Cairns, where the couple had been staying, to see if they had returned. They had not. A five-day search began, which turned up no trace of Eileen or Tom. After more than 48 hours in the ocean, the couple may have drowned, or been eaten by sharks. But as the chilling story broke, other theories emerged. One is that they committed suicide, or a murder-suicide took place. Journals in their hotel room hinted at personal troubles, but the couple were devout Catholics with good prospects.

Reference: A Watery Grave.  Also, check The Cruel Sea.

Employing his artistic license, Kentis fashions a gruesome end to the couple - Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) - who are inadvertently abandoned in shark-infested waters.  But critic Roger Ebert speaks to the apparent popularity of Open Water:

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. "Open Water" had that effect on me.

That's not to say "Open Water" is a thriller that churned my emotions. It's a quiet film, really, in which less and less happens as a large implacable reality begins to form. The ending is so low-key, we almost miss it. It tells the story of a couple who go scuba diving and surface to discover that a curious thing has happened: The boat has left without them. The horizon is empty in all directions. They feel very alone.

I'm not afraid of water and don't spend much time thinking about sharks, but the prospect of being lost, of being forgotten about, awakens emotions from deep in childhood. To be left behind stirs such anger and hopelessness.

When night follows day, when thirst becomes unbearable, when jellyfish sting, when sharks make themselves known, when the boat still does not come back for them, their situation becomes a vast dark cosmic joke.

I don't always agree with Ebert, of course, but there is lyrical resonance in how he describes the effect this film had on him.  It's one thing to weigh fact vs fiction as a case for intellect, and it's quite another to experience it as a matter for gut and soul.  We may never know what happened to the Lonergan couple, but even the thought of being stranded in endless miles of ocean is, in and of itself, frightening.  This simply-shot film succeeds in this fashion.