I love noticing weird little parallels that lurk just under the surface, don’t you; I mean, for example, just take Under Paris: Xavier Gens’ new killer shark movie that just surfaced on Netflix.
Gens first movie was the impressively grim Frontier(s), a graphic, nihilistic horror/thriller that essentially was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with Nazis, but joining him during an extremely fertile time in French horror cinema was Alexandre Aja, who released the similarly punishing Haute Tension. Fast forward a bit and after delivering the tits & teeth combo of Piranha 3D in 2010, Aja then delivered the flashy, high concept Crawl, a 2019 killer animal movie that saw voracious crocodiles hungily take a flood in Florida as an excuse to treat trapped residents as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Well, guess what? Xens has followed his fellow countryman into the realms of the killer animal genre; but while Aja went full Hollywood, Under Paris sees Gens keeping the habits of a razor-toothed predator more closer to home. Zut alors!
North of Hawaii lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of discarded plastics that’s three times the size of France, that’s built up thanks to decades of careless polluting. In this ecological timebomb, we find Sophia, her husband and her fellow researchers as they are track Lilith, a two meter long mako shark that they’ve been studying; however, as these eager boffins strap on their scuba gear and hurl themselves into the sea, they soon find that nature is about to play a cruel trick on them.
After finding a suffocated baby sperm whale with a gargantuan bite taken out of it, Lilith makes her presence felt – but thank to an unforeseen evolutionary blow-up, the mako has inexplicably ballooned in size to a whopping seven meters long and promptly displays that she has an appetite to match.
Three years after the traumatic feeding frenzy that reduced her husband to just a single, floating hand (complete with the wedding ring still attached), Sophia is living in Paris while still trying to move on from the splashy massacre, but it seems that Lilith simply won’t leave her thoughts. Thanks to a handy, dandy tracker lodged in the shark’s side, Sophia finds that the hefty predator has decided to make it’s new home in the Seine while feeding on the odd homeless guy who strays too close to the edge. Worse yet a gaggle over over eager eco-warriors are desperate to preserve Lilith at any cost in order to safely escort her back to the sea – but in case this is all feeling a tad too original, let’s not forget that the unscrupulous mayor has no intention of calling off the upcoming triathlon event no matter how much Sophia and river officer Adil drive home the fact that another bloody disaster is imminent.
After a period of rather bloodless shark movies (with more than a couple of them making their underwhelming bow on Netflix), it’s nice to see a new release hit the streaming service that has a bit of pressure behind it’s bite. That’s not to say that Gens’ bout of mako madness isn’t utterly ridiculous or overwhelmingly familiar as all modern shark movies often are, but thanks to the director having the balls to play such a silly premise straight (if a great white can vacation in the Bahamas in Jaws: The Revenge, why can’t one take a gap year in France?), Under Paris proves to be the most dorsel-finned fun that’s come along in ages.
The main bonus us that the ludicrous premise is utilised really well, with the taking full advantage of the unusual setting much like the way bizarre, 80s psycho/thriller, Amsterdamned, used the canals with its toothy antagonist zipping up and down the river like a limb-guzzling torpedo.
The premise, obviously, is the sort of preposterous bullshit that’s kept the genre alive for years as pollution has apparently not only allowed Lilith to grown to such outlandish size and suddenly become able thrive in fresh water, but she’s also developed the Jurassic Park-style ability to impregnate herself and give birth to pre-pregnant offspring which obviously raises the stakes (and the disbelief) exponentially.
As a result, Gens gives us a rather nicely balanced thriller that strives to follow something of a less is more approach as it takes it’s time establishing Bénénice Bejo’s traumatised lead, Nassim Lyes’ dashing cop and Léa Léviant’s horribly naive activist, but as you start to get a little frustrated with all the people stuff and worry that we’ve gotten yet another Netflix shark movie that barely has any sharks in it, the script up-shifts into a thrillingly bonkers final forty minutes that ups fatal chewings by at least 65%.
Imagine the frenzied insanity of the main set piece of Piranha 3D, set it in the skull-lined catacombs of Paris, reduce the laughs and a possibility of an Eli Roth cameo, but keep the same level of flesh chewing violence and you have a scene that’s tonally confusing (so wait, were supposed to enjoy a set piece that sees a bunch of CEO warriors getting mauled in a film that also has a sizable ecological message?), but also extremely fucking cool.
But wait, things get even better, as we move on from a bunch of French Greta Thumbergs getting munched to death, to the final set piece which sees Lilith become an unofficial entry in the World Triathlon Championships much to the horror of the unfeasibly smug mayor. As bullets fly, swimmers get crunched and the dozens of unexploded shells that lay at the bottom of the river come into play, it’s in this final battle that Gens finally jumps the shark in a way that will either make or break the film for you. You see, those familiar with Gens’ output may be familiar with a stunningly nihilistic thriller by the name of The Divide which has one of the more devastating endings I’ve ever seen, and as a result, Under Paris gets a surprisingly down beat ending that’s so outlandish, you’ll either declare it outright awful, or utter genius.
Predictably, I thought it was fucking fantastic and it goes a long way to counteracting some of the many overly familiar sections of the plot and some of the more blander characters who wait around dutifully until it’s their time to fall screaming into the water. But with a wonderfully ludicrous concept, some satisfyinging messy details (watch Sophia’s eardrums burst in excruciating detail during an early moment), a couple of action sequences that match Deep Blue Sea for outright craziness and that knockout ending, killer shark fans hungering for carnage with a budget should happily snap this up.
In other words, this is a shark movie that’s downright and delightfully in Seine.
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