Amazon Prime is offering a film this Monday that gave me a dark movie night. At first glance, as a poster tile on a streaming service, The Requin doesn’t look like the disaster it hides. He doesn’t yell “Trash!” like other monster movies called Sharkbear vs. Mega-Octopus.
When you fire up The Requin, you expect a dense, understated shark survival thriller in the vein of The Shallows. After all, he convinced 90s star Alicia Silverstone (Clueless) of himself! But The Requin is none of that and I want to protect you from this perfidious film trap.
What is The Requin about and why is The Requin even called “The Requin“?
“Requin” is French and simply means: Shark. Why the film chose a French title does not become clear as the story progresses. It’s not even about a specific shark, let alone a shark with French kin or whatever.
Leonine
Alicia Silverstone in The Requin
In the thriller, a couple (Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper) plan to vacation at a beach resort in Vietnam. But the picturesque house on stilts on the water becomes a death trap when a tropical storm breaks over the coast at night and sweeps the hut away. Suddenly the two vacationers have to survive on the open sea and without supplies. Not only do they have to fear the elements, hunger and thirst, but also a flock of sharks.
Some facts about The Requin:
Horror numbers: The Requin’s ratings are sub-par
These are the ratings for The Requin at a glance:
FILM STARTS: 1.6 (user) and 2.0 (criticism) out of 5
Yes, The Requin earned every single hate rating
Leonine
An image you definitely won’t see in The Requin
$8.5 million isn’t much, but it’s not nothing either (the horror-surprise hit Talk to Me, for example, only cost $4.5 million). And The Requin features people whose faces you’ve seen somewhere else before. At this level I have rarely seen a more aimless and ugly film. Sometimes Alicia Silverstone runs across a rocky beach and it seems like someone forgot to put the background.
The screenplay has apparently given up at the latest halfway through linking scenes that follow one another in a meaningful and exciting way. This creates fever-dream moments as a shark nibbles on Alicia Silverstone as she lies in ankle-deep water. At that point it was already too late for me – the way back was, metaphorically speaking, longer than the rest of the journey. These are evenings when you don’t feel captivated by a film, you feel trapped.
I want to spare you that: Keep your hands off The Requin. Do this, if at all, only out of morbid curiosity. And I don’t want to hear any complaints at the end. You have been warned…
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