I seem to have developed a fairly predictable way of choosing shark films: the thalassophobe in me sees a stretch of deep water and immediately decides to investigate, preferably from the safety of the sofa. Yet that was more or less my entry point into Above & Below. Deep water does something particular to me on screen, and it is not necessarily the shark itself. Sharks are almost reassuringly specific. They have a shape, teeth, fins and a direction of travel. What bothers me more is everything surrounding them: the empty blue, the loss of scale, the inability to see what is twenty metres behind you, and that peculiar underwater darkness where something can move from being a faint grey suggestion into an immediate problem rather quickly.
So Above & Below already had one advantage before I pressed play. It had water, it had a shark cage, it had a group of young people making questionable holiday decisions, and it had Antonio Banderas apparently brought in to provide the sort of recognisable name that helps a modest thriller travel a little further. That combination was enough to get me started. More surprisingly, it was enough to keep me awake through the whole thing.
I realise that sounds like exceptionally faint praise, but there are plenty of films that arrive at night with much larger reputations and still lose the battle against the sofa. Above & Below did not. Once its uncomplicated machinery started turning — young tourists, shark-diving excursion, cocaine, armed men, rapidly diminishing oxygen — I stayed with it. I would not oversell what happened next. This is an okay thriller at best, but sometimes an okay thriller that understands its environment and keeps moving is enough.
The Holiday Nobody Should Have Booked
The film follows five young people holidaying in Mexico: Tatiana, played by Laura Marano; her brother Kyle, played by Diego Llinás; Tatiana’s increasingly ex-boyfriend-shaped boyfriend TJ, played by Donncha Tynan; Tatiana’s friend Kaley, played by Christina Ochoa; and Kaley’s boyfriend Danny, played by Ryan Bertroche. Kyle has the sort of gambling problem that makes being invited to a private card game with Antonio Banderas seem less like an opportunity than the opening paragraph of an insurance claim.
He loses badly to Esteban Burns, played by Banderas with the relaxed confidence of somebody who already knows how the conversation ends. Rather than demanding immediate payment or breaking anything important, Burns offers Kyle something that seems almost suspiciously generous: a free private shark-diving excursion for him and his friends. Kyle accepts because of course he does. Nobody in the film seems prepared to point out that accepting expensive gifts from mysterious men after losing money to them at poker is generally poor holiday planning.
The next day, the group boards the Afrikat, a catamaran captained by Logan, played by Timothy V. Murphy. Two additional passengers arrive carrying expensive-looking bags: Martin, played by Louis Mandylor, and Garrison, played by Jess Liaudin. They have the unmistakable atmosphere of men whose luggage you should never accidentally unzip. Naturally, somebody does, and the discovery of cocaine turns a slightly dodgy shark excursion into a hostage situation with impressive efficiency.
Bodies begin hitting the water, one of the drug bags disappears into the depths, and Tatiana and Kaley find themselves sitting inside a shark cage while everything above them deteriorates. It is a solid B-movie mechanism because the title really does describe the structure. Below the surface are sharks, failing air supplies and the unknowable blue. Above the surface are guns, drug smugglers and Antonio Banderas becoming increasingly irritated. Neither level offers much comfort.
Two Films Sharing One Boat
Above & Below was directed by Jesse V. Johnson from a screenplay by Anthony Steven Giordano, usually credited as Tony Giordano. It is an original screenplay rather than an adaptation, remake or documented true story, which means there is no source novel lurking underneath the film waiting to explain why certain things happen. This is simply a genre contraption assembled from very familiar pieces.
That familiarity is simultaneously the film’s greatest weakness and one of its advantages. There is not much here that feels genuinely new. Cage-diving thrillers already have their own miniature grammar, with 47 Meters Down being the most obvious modern comparison, while criminals forcing people into dangerous water to recover contraband is hardly untouched territory. Even the broader trick of combining an animal threat with a much nastier human threat has been around for years.
Yet Above & Below understands that if you are going to assemble second-hand parts, you should at least make sure the machine runs. Johnson is an action director with a long background in stunt work, and there is a physical directness to the film that helps keep it from becoming another anonymous streaming shark picture. He reportedly received the screenplay while shooting Thieves Highway and initially thought the underwater work and younger cast placed the material slightly outside his usual comfort zone. That discomfort apparently became part of the reason he took it on.
Production took place in 2025, with shooting running from late June into July. Maxime Alexandre served as cinematographer and María Vertiz composed the score. Open-water material was filmed off Gran Canaria, while controlled underwater work was completed at the large water facilities at Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria. Johnson has said the production spent roughly two weeks shooting underwater, which is a significant amount of work for a film operating on this scale.
The finished picture runs at around an hour and a half, which feels about right. There is not enough character depth or narrative complexity here to support two hours, and the compact running time is one of the reasons the film remains watchable. It knows the difference between maintaining tension and simply keeping people underwater for longer.
Tatiana Has to Become the Film
Laura Marano’s Tatiana begins as the sensible member of the holiday group, although this is not an especially difficult title to win when your brother is gambling away money and everyone else seems perfectly happy to climb into a shark cage for entertainment. For a while she appears to be the standard reluctant survivor: the person who senses something is wrong before everyone else and is then forced to spend the rest of the film proving she was right.
Marano gives her more presence than that description suggests. Once Tatiana and Kaley are trapped beneath the surface, the film gradually transfers almost all responsibility to her. She has to manage air, assess injuries, negotiate with Burns, look after Kaley and eventually leave the relative protection of the cage. The progression from holidaymaker to survivor is broad but reasonably convincing because the film does not introduce Tatiana as somebody secretly equipped with action-hero abilities.
Johnson has talked about wanting that transformation to feel like an ordinary person discovering what she can do once events demand it, while Marano has described the production as the most physically challenging work she had done. The cast trained for the underwater sequences and earned scuba certification, with Marano apparently adapting particularly well to the diving.
That effort helps because there are moments when the screenplay asks a lot from Tatiana’s sudden composure. A woman trapped underwater among sharks, surrounded by dead friends and armed criminals, becomes remarkably good at strategic problem-solving remarkably quickly. Still, Marano sells enough of it to keep the character functioning as more than a piece of bait. More importantly, she gives us somebody to follow rather than merely somebody to wait for the shark to approach.
Five Friends, Not Much Time to Know Them
The rest of the younger cast have less room to establish themselves. Kyle is essentially the problem generator. He is Tatiana’s brother, supposedly recovering from earlier troubles while remaining quite capable of manufacturing new ones. His gambling loss is what places everybody on the path towards the boat, and his tendency to make bad decisions while other people deal with the consequences becomes one of his defining characteristics.
That can make him irritating, but it also makes him useful. If everybody in a thriller behaved sensibly, most thrillers would run for approximately eleven minutes. Kyle’s role is to keep nudging the story towards places it should not go.
TJ and Danny are more functional. TJ’s relationship with Tatiana is already fraying before the main trouble begins, while Danny and Kaley make up the other couple. Once violence breaks out, the two men become part of the film’s casualty machinery rather than developing very far beyond their original roles.
What is interesting is how much more complicated their underwater deaths were to film than they appear on screen. Ryan Bertroche had to remain weighted and motionless underwater as Danny, holding his breath after the safety divers had cleared the frame. Donncha Tynan, meanwhile, had the even less pleasant task of hanging upside down underwater while appearing dead. These are the kinds of production details that change the texture of a scene once you know them. Something that occupies only a few seconds of screen time may have required careful weighting, breath control, lighting, safety crews and an actor trying not to twitch.
Kaley fares better because keeping her alive gives Tatiana somebody to protect. Christina Ochoa spends much of the latter half injured, frightened and running out of options, but that vulnerability gives the underwater sequences more emotional traction. Tatiana is not simply trying to save herself, and the friendship gives the film a little more to work with than two anonymous divers staring at oxygen gauges.
Banderas, Burns and the Men Above the Water
Then there is Antonio Banderas, who I assume was expected to be the celebrity draw. There is something reassuringly old-fashioned about attaching a proper movie star to a relatively modest shark-and-drug thriller and letting his name do some of the marketing work.
He plays Burns perfectly adequately, and I mean that fairly rather than dismissively. Burns is not a particularly complicated villain. He is a drug boss who believes himself sophisticated, dislikes disorder and becomes increasingly murderous when Martin turns what should have been a simple operation into an afternoon of corpses, missing cocaine and shark-related inconvenience.
Banderas gives him enough charm to make the early poker-table offer plausible and enough instability to make the later scenes work. He also has that useful movie-star ability to make fairly ordinary dialogue sound more deliberate than it probably was on the page.
Johnson apparently altered the villains substantially from the screenplay’s earlier conception. The antagonists had initially been envisioned as younger drug dealers, but he preferred older, experienced performers who could give the criminal side more texture. That led to Banderas, Louis Mandylor and Jess Liaudin as Burns, Martin and Garrison, which was probably the correct decision.
Mandylor’s Martin is the wild card: crude, impatient and responsible for turning an already questionable situation into outright disaster. Garrison is quieter, and Liaudin plays him as somebody watching Burns rather than simply obeying him. That distinction becomes useful later.
Captain Logan sits somewhere between the tourists and the criminals. Timothy V. Murphy gives him an exhausted, weathered quality that helps enormously. He looks like a man who has spent enough time around boats to have seen several varieties of human stupidity and no longer finds any of them especially surprising. In a louder film he might have disappeared, but here he gives the boat some badly needed gravity.
Why the Sharks Feel Like They Belong There
This was the thing that surprised me most. The underwater scenes did not look like the usual collection of generic shark footage inserted whenever the editing required another fin, or at least they did not feel that way.
Researching the production afterwards helped explain why. The sharks themselves are digital creations, but the actors were not simply performing against empty water and hoping somebody added the correct animal later. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre proposed having a stunt diver circle the actors underwater using a propulsion device, effectively performing the shark’s movement. That gave the cast a real moving target for their eyelines and physical reactions. Other stunt divers physically pulled and jolted performers during attack sequences, creating actual force for them to respond to.
That is exactly the kind of invisible craft I appreciate. You do not necessarily notice what has been done; you simply notice that the result does not look rubbish. The digital shark inherits believable eyelines, body reactions and spatial relationships because everybody was reacting to something moving through the water around them.
The filmmakers also ran into the usual production truth that money eventually decides how much monster you get. Johnson has said they originally planned considerably more shark material and ended up with a visual-effects requirement far beyond the available budget. He and editor Matthew Lorentz reduced the number of shots and concentrated the resources on fewer appearances. Johnson later felt that this improved the film because they kept the shark moments that actually mattered.
That explains a lot of what worked for me. The sharks are not constantly on screen, but when they appear they usually belong to the scene rather than interrupting it. There is even a mildly wonderful irony in the production encountering a real hammerhead shark during the Gran Canaria shoot. It reportedly circled the boat for hours on a day Louis Mandylor was supposed to enter the water. The crew filmed it, only for Johnson to decide that the actual shark did not look threatening enough for the movie. Apparently nature also sometimes fails the audition.
Blue Is More Useful Than Darkness
Maxime Alexandre’s cinematography is probably the film’s strongest technical element. Johnson had previously worked with him and has specifically mentioned Alexandre’s work on Crawl as part of the reason he wanted him here. That makes sense. Crawl understood that creature suspense is partly a matter of geography: knowing where the person is, understanding where safety might be and gradually becoming aware of all the spaces through which something unpleasant could arrive.
Above & Below works in a similar way. The film does not turn the water into murky soup merely to conceal weak effects. Much of it is remarkably clear, and the fear comes from the depth rather than from visual confusion. Blue extends backwards until it stops providing useful information.
That is exactly where my discomfort with deep water kicks in. The shark does not need to be visible all the time. It only needs enough empty space from which to appear. The cage initially helps by giving the frame a rigid visual structure. Its bars are reassuring because they create a geometric boundary between human beings and the sea. Once the cage sinks, the oxygen starts disappearing and injured people need help, that same structure becomes confinement. Sanctuary turns into prison without the production design needing to change at all.
Above the surface, everything is bright: white boat, hard sun, holiday clothes and beautiful water. Those pleasant colours make the violence slightly more absurd because the environment keeps insisting that this should have been a nice day out. The title’s visual idea is simple but effective. There is clear blue water below and harsh sunlight above, with different kinds of predators operating in each space.
The Score Knows There Is Already a Shark Theme
María Vertiz composed the original score, and the filmmakers seem to have understood one unavoidable problem: everybody making shark music is working in the shadow of John Williams whether they like it or not.
Johnson has talked about deliberately avoiding imitation of Jaws. Rather than using music to loudly announce the arrival of a shark, the score is used more selectively for tension and emotion. That is probably the smartest approach because there is little value in pretending audiences have forgotten those two notes.
By now Jaws is not merely another shark film. It is part of the cultural language surrounding the animal. A fin, an empty stretch of sea and a certain kind of low musical pulse can summon Spielberg’s film without anyone needing to mention Amity Island. Above & Below does not try to win that fight. It concentrates more on machinery, breathing, bubbles, muffled voices and the quiet pressure of being underwater.
The sound works best when it remembers that limitation is frightening. You cannot run properly underwater, you cannot shout in any useful sense, and every frightened breath is consuming something finite. Those practical restrictions do more for the tension than a louder score would.
Where the Film Starts Leaking
The stronger craft does not magically produce a stronger screenplay. There are several stretches where Above & Below feels as though it is repeating the same problem with slightly different oxygen levels. Tatiana and Kaley are trapped, Burns wants the bag, somebody threatens somebody, a new obstacle appears, the women have to leave the cage, a shark materialises, and the film circles back towards the same central predicament. The structure works well enough to keep things moving, but it occasionally gives the impression that the filmmakers have found one effective situation and are reluctant to move too far away from it.
There are also leaps of plausibility that are probably best approached with the sort of generosity traditionally afforded to shark films involving cartel cocaine. Tatiana managing to get an SOS signal through her phone while underwater is certainly convenient, and some of the logistics surrounding the boats, communications and characters appearing where the next piece of action requires them do not bear much inspection.
The younger characters are another limitation. I did not dislike them enough to start openly supporting the sharks, which already puts the film ahead of quite a lot of the genre, but I was not devastated when the numbers began shrinking either. Tatiana is the clear exception. Everybody else is mostly there to create stakes, make mistakes or provide evidence that the sharks are not decorative. That keeps the thriller functioning, but it does not give it much emotional afterlife.
Spoilers: The Water Collects Its Share
Once Martin’s drug bag ends up on the sea floor, the film effectively turns Tatiana into Burns’ unwilling salvage diver. The deaths above begin feeding the danger below, sometimes quite literally. Bodies enter the water, blood attracts attention, the cage drops to the bottom and oxygen becomes a clock.
Danny dies underwater. TJ is killed and eventually becomes part of Tatiana’s final descent, forcing her to encounter the remains of somebody with whom she already had unresolved emotional business. Johnson has discussed the importance of keeping Marano’s eyes clearly visible through the mask in these sequences because so much of the emotional performance had to happen without normal dialogue. That choice helps. In an underwater survival film, the face is partly hidden, the voice is gone and the eyes have to carry far more weight than usual.
Martin eventually goes into the water himself, which does not go particularly well for Martin. The sharks leave him in a state that required a fairly elaborate prosthetic body, one which apparently caused its own production adventure when it later had to travel through Madrid airport in a bag. It is almost a more memorable anecdote than the character himself.
Kaley is badly hurt but survives, while Kyle also makes it through despite absorbing an impressive amount of punishment for the decisions that put everyone there. Tatiana is eventually forced to retrieve Burns’ cocaine herself when he uses Kyle as leverage. This produces the film’s most overt action-hero moment as she leaves the cage, retrieves the bag, confronts a shark at extremely close range and eventually attacks it with a knife. By this stage plausibility has more or less left the boat, but I did not especially mind. The film has spent enough time trapping Tatiana that giving her one thoroughly excessive survival moment feels earned as genre release.
Back aboard the Afrikat, Burns predictably reveals that his promises about letting everyone go were never worth very much. Garrison finally refuses to keep following orders, deciding that Burns has crossed the line from business into something more personal and irrational. Tatiana then turns the situation back on Burns and forces him off the boat.
He still manages the obligatory threat that they have not seen the last of him, which lasts roughly as long as such threats usually do in thrillers. Burns’ getaway ends in fire after fuel and a flare become involved, leaving his elegant menace considerably less useful than it sounded a few moments earlier. Captain Logan, Garrison and the surviving tourists are left heading towards medical help, while the original group of five has been reduced to Tatiana, Kaley and Kyle. Roughly half the holiday party gets out alive. Mexico probably does not get a five-star review.
Sharks Are Almost the Innocent Party
One thing I rather like about Above & Below is that the sharks themselves never become evil. They are dangerous and they eat people, which is obviously not ideal if you happen to be one of the people, but the film repeatedly establishes that the humans are the ones making conscious choices. Burns chooses cruelty. Martin chooses aggression. Kyle chooses gambling. Everybody chooses to get on the boat. The sharks are simply occupying the same water.
Johnson has said he researched the animals through museums, aquariums and specialists rather than relying entirely on previous shark films, and his intention was to let the human characters create the suspense while the animals created the danger. That distinction gives the film slightly more sense than the usual revenge-shark nonsense.
There is no suggestion that a great white has developed a personal objection to Tatiana. She happens to be in the same water, and that is enough. For me, that is actually more frightening. An animal with a vendetta can become camp very quickly. An animal simply passing through an environment in which you are badly equipped to survive is something else.
Fifty Years After Jaws, We Are Still Getting in the Water
The cultural timing of Above & Below is interesting because shark films now carry their own history with them. There is Spielberg’s Jaws, obviously, followed by the sequels, Deep Blue Sea, Open Water, The Shallows, 47 Meters Down, The Meg, countless cable movies, streaming films, knowingly terrible shark pictures and the entire branch of television culture that has turned these animals into both objects of scientific fascination and seasonal entertainment.
Every new shark thriller enters the water carrying all of that baggage. It is almost impossible to make the animal unfamiliar again, which means the more useful question is whether a film can make the situation uncomfortable.
Above & Below occasionally does. It does not manage that because it has invented a shark I have never seen before, and it does not need to. It works when it makes the water feel deep, the air feel limited and the distance back to safety feel larger than it probably looked from the boat.
That is also where the film brushes against something more interesting than its cartel-thriller mechanics. Shark cinema has always relied partly on the idea that the ocean is a place humans visit rather than control. We can build cages, boats, tanks and diving equipment, but all of that technology is temporary. The environment is indifferent to our plans.
The criminal plot in Above & Below is ridiculous enough that I would not want to burden it with too much symbolism, but the contrast is still there. Burns behaves as though he controls everything on the boat because he has money, guns and men. Underwater, none of those things matter very much. A failing air tank has no interest in his authority, and neither does the shark.
Still Awake When the Credits Rolled
That is more or less where I ended up with Above & Below. The writing is ordinary. Several of the supporting characters barely develop beyond survival-thriller inventory. The criminal plot depends on people making decisions nobody sensible should make. Antonio Banderas gives the film useful star power without transforming it into anything grander, and the final act becomes increasingly ridiculous the longer it goes.
But the underwater photography is better than I expected, the sharks do not look like somebody pasted documentary footage into an unrelated film, Laura Marano carries the second half convincingly enough, and Jesse V. Johnson keeps the various dangers moving without letting the whole thing lapse into complete inertia.
Most importantly, it kept me awake. There is something almost refreshingly modest about being able to say that. Not every film needs to become a personal landmark, and not every thriller needs a thesis about civilisation. Sometimes I want a boat, some bad decisions, too little oxygen and a large shape moving through a field of blue where I would very much prefer there were no large shapes.
Above & Below gave me that. It is an okay thriller at best, but whenever Tatiana was outside the cage and the water behind her turned into nothing but blue space, the thalassophobe in me was paying attention. The sharks were doing what sharks have been doing in films for half a century. It was everything around them that bothered me more.
Leave a Reply