Underwater
Director: William Eubank
Writer: Brian Duffield, Adam Cozad
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, John Gallagher Jr., Jessica Henwick, Mamoudou Athie, Gunner Wright
Seen on: 7.1.2026

Plot:
Norah (Kristen Stewart) works on a research station on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. When an earthquake hits their station, things go from bad to worse really quickly. Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) tries to gather what is left of his crew and lead them to safety somehow. But the bottom of the ocean is dangerous in many ways.

Underwater is a tight, effective film that is good at what it does, despite a couple of flaws. It definitely knows how to rack up tension and will probably leave you at the edge of your seat for long stretches.

Underwater is somewhere between disaster movie and creature feature. While I like both those genres, I don’t think that the transition between the two works all that well here. Especially because I took some issues with the creature design (what do you mean, a creature that lives at the bottom of the ocean relies on eye sight? And that shape is really not very realistic for that environment either).

The film is at its best when it is a disaster movie but it manages to keep tension high throughout. There were only a couple of moments where the action in the murky dark became so indecipherable for me that I couldn’t follow things anymore – and the film lost me for short stretches there. As it jarred me out o fit when it actually killed off the one Black guy (Mamoudou Athie) first as if the film was made in 1980 and not 2020. We need quite a few more movies without that trope before we can collectively do that again.

But the characters always got me back. Norah is the emotional centerpiece, and Stewart keeps us close to her at all times. But Jessica Henwick is an absolute scene stealer – something the film also needed when considering how it ends. I definitely loved her Emily. That not one, but two characters have the same manipulative backstory, designed to get out emotional investment up quickly and explain their actions at the same time is a little lazy. It might have worked if the film had actually put their stories into conversation with each other, but it never does.

In any case, I was invested, I was hooked, I was curious to see where things were headed and even if the film sometimes becomes a little too reminiscent of other movies that came before it, I had fun with it.

Summarizing: is pretty much exactly what it is supposed to be.