Open Water

Yuppie lovers played by Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis take an oft-postponed and much-needed vacation in the tropics. They hop aboard a chartered boat, scuba dive and surface to find their boat gone, which leaves another 50-plus minutes of screen time to squabble about their disintegrating relationship and face the very real and present danger of being eaten alive by sharks. This generally grubby digital-video film-festival cocktail jangled my nerves at times. It’s sort of a “Jaws meets The Blair Witch Project” construct that flaunts its primitive production values, dark humor and thin content like a cocky reality-TV show. But the intermittent, clunkier moments yanked me out of the story at hand, and the poor lighting, choppy sound and home-movie texture worked against the story at times, rather than heightening its suspense and terror.