Great White

The shark movie subgenre is currently the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food dollar menu: reliable, somewhat greasy, and usually forgotten the second you finish the last bite. Ever since Bruce cleared the beaches in 1975, every filmmaker with a GoPro and a dream has tried to recapture that primal dread of the deep. Enter Great White (2021), an Australian survival thriller that swam into the crowded waters of the post-pandemic VOD market and promptly sank into the abyss of "wait, which shark movie was that again?"

I watched this on a Tuesday evening while trying to ignore a particularly stubborn hangnail, and I found that my obsession with my thumb was occasionally more gripping than the plight of our shipwrecked protagonists. That’s not to say Great White is a disaster—it’s actually a very handsome, professionally shot piece of survival horror—but it struggles to find its own dorsal fin in a sea of better-known predators.

The Geometry of a Floating Coffin

The premise is as sturdy and familiar as a rusty anchor. We follow Kaz (Katrina Bowden, whom I’ll always adore for her comedic timing in 30 Rock and the cult-classic Tucker & Dale vs. Evil) and her partner Charlie (Aaron Jakubenko), a pair of seaplane operators struggling to keep their business afloat in the beautiful, tourist-heavy waters of Australia. They take a wealthy couple, Joji (Tim Kano) and Michelle (Kimie Tsukakoshi), along with their cook/assistant Benny (Te Kohe Tuhaka), on a trip to a remote reef.

Naturally, things go south. A plane crash leaves them bobbing in an inflatable life raft with miles of ocean between them and safety. Oh, and there’s a massive, hungry Great White shark that has decided this particular raft is a floating charcuterie board.

Director Martin Wilson makes the most of the claustrophobia. There is a genuine sense of spatial anxiety once the five survivors are crammed into that yellow raft. In our current era of "The Volume" and seamless green screens, there’s something refreshing about seeing actors actually getting wet and looking genuinely miserable under the sun. However, the tension is frequently undercut by the human drama. Joji, in particular, is written with such high-octane irritability that I found myself rooting for the shark just to get some peace and quiet. The character logic here has the structural integrity of wet tissue paper, especially when they decide to make breaks for it in ways that would make a toddler question their survival instincts.

Practical Teeth in a Digital Ocean

What earns Great White a few extra points in my book is the effort put into the titular beast. In an age where low-budget horror often relies on "Syfy Channel" quality CGI that looks like it was rendered on a toaster, Martin Wilson and his crew utilized a life-sized animatronic shark for several sequences. When you see that physical snout bumping against the raft, it triggers a lizard-brain response that pixels just can't replicate.

Of course, the CGI is still there for the more "kinetic" moments, and the transition between the two can be jarring. It’s a common struggle in contemporary horror—balancing the tactile grit of practical effects with the budgetary necessity of digital doubles. When the shark is a looming shadow or a physical presence, the film works. When it becomes a digital missile launching out of the water, the spell breaks.

The score by Tim Count does a lot of the heavy lifting here, avoiding the "dun-dun" clichés of John Williams and instead opting for a more atmospheric, droning dread. It reflects a modern shift in horror soundscapes where silence and ambient hums are used to represent the vast, uncaring emptiness of nature. It’s effective, even if the screenplay by Michael Boughen occasionally feels like it’s checking off a "Shark Movie Tropes" bingo card.

Why This One Stayed in the Shallows

Released during the strange, stuttering reopening of global cinema in 2021, Great White never really had a chance to become a "moment." It’s a quintessential streaming-era film—the kind of movie that looks great in a thumbnail and provides a solid 90 minutes of distraction before you move on to the next thing. It lacks the high-concept hook of 47 Meters Down or the lean, mean "one-woman-vs-nature" perfection of The Shallows.

The film’s obscurity is largely a result of its timing and its refusal to take risks. In 2021, we were all dealing with a very real, invisible threat; perhaps a giant shark felt a bit too "old school" for the cultural conversation. It also suffered from a lack of "water cooler" moments. There are no "bigger boat" quotes here, just a group of people making increasingly poor decisions in a very pretty location.

I don't regret the time spent with it, though. If you’re a shark cinema completist, there’s enough craft on display to justify a viewing. The cinematography by Tony O'Loughlan captures the terrifying beauty of the Australian coastline with such clarity that you’ll want to book a flight and cancel it in the same breath. Just don’t expect it to change your life—or your fear of the water.

Great White is a perfectly functional, occasionally tense thriller that suffers from being "just okay" in a genre that demands either excellence or glorious trashiness. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a souvenir keychain: you’re glad you have it while you’re looking at it, but you won't notice if it goes missing from your pocket. If you’ve already seen The Reef (2010) and need another Aussie fix of salt-water terror, this will do the trick, but it won't be the film that makes you stay on the sand.