Anyone who thought that red wine poisoning was the greatest danger when walking along the Seine, urgently needs to further educate himself at NetflixThe (completely non-factual) thriller In the Waters of the Seine has been streaming there since this week. In it, a female shark roams the center of Paris and nibbles on WaPo divers with her offspring. Within a few days, the little fish have eaten their way to the top of the streaming service’s top 10. Well deserved!
The Netflix thriller In the Waters of the Seine brings Jaws to Paris
Behind In the Water of the Seine is director and co-author Xavier Gens, who once carved his way into the annals of French horror cinema with Frontier(s). After a few failures like Hitman, things went quieter for him. In the Waters of the Seine was by no means a sure-fire success on Netflix. This makes the positive surprise all the more pleasant. With his new thriller, Gens delivers a pop-rocker that updates Steven Spielberg’s Jaws for the city of love on the eve of the Summer Olympics.
Watch the trailer for In the Waters of the Seine:
In the Waters of the Seine – Trailer (German) HD
Bérénice Bejo, Oscar-nominated for The Artist, plays scientist and diver Sophia. She turned her back on the sea after a shark attack. Now, however, she is about to meet the beast she once wanted to protect again. A mutated shark finds its (or rather your) way into the watery heart of Paris and has other surprises in store.
While environmentalist Mika (Lea Leviant) wants to protect the animal from human access, Sophia and water policeman Adil (Nassim Lyes) want to warn the authorities about the danger in the river. The mayor ignores them, however. Nothing should damage the image of the city, which just happens to be holding a triathlon world championship on the Seine.
Sea monsters take revenge for environmental pollution
The story sounds rather absurd and it is. Swimmers in Paris should expect E. coli bacteria rather than voracious giant sharks tearing their victims to pieces. And there are some delightfully exaggerated feeding scenes to be seen in In the Water of the Seine. From the opening, in which the sharks take revenge for the plastic pollution of the oceansuntil a rather bloody awakening of Gen-Z activists, not a dry eye or body part remains here.
Netflix
In the water of the Seine
The visual effects of the film, which Le Parisien reports cost 20 million euros, cannot always keep up with the acrobatic killing choreography of the sharks. But that is rarely a problem, as we are dealing with cartoon-like deaths anyway. Realistic horror looks different and laughter is explicitly allowed here.
Jason Statham and The Meg come and go next to the Netflix sharks
Nevertheless, In the Waters of the Seine avoids some of the pitfalls that paralyze the great shark franchise of our time: the total of around 260 million dollar Meg movies with Jason Statham. Stories that are more bloated than the belly of a Megalodon, unsightly underwater action and so much ironic winks that a sense of danger never arises – this is what Meg and Meg 2: The Deep suffers from.
In contrast, Xavier Gens, despite all the fun he has with exaggeration, maintains a fundamental seriousness and does so with a harshness that can turn anyone into a victim. The sharks in the Netflix film may not look particularly real, but they exude danger. Which fits perfectly with a film in which one threat looms over everything, even the sharks: that of man-made destruction.