A couple, on a deep-sea diving excursion, rise to the surface to find that their boat has departed without them. They’re stranded in open ocean water.

That’s certainly a terrifying scenario (and based on a true incident), but the movie isn’t entirely satisfying. Even at its short running time of 79 minutes, Open Water is dreadfully dull at times.

The first 15 minutes or so covers background, as Daniel and Susan get ready for what’s apparently a much-needed vacation. Susan is shown talking on her cell phone a few times, establishing that she leads a Hectic Life that serves as the impetus for the downtime. Then we see them board the boat with 18 other divers, travel to the dive location, and plunge into the water. The guides count how many divers have returned, but they miscount (one guy, after returning, goes back in with another guy who’d forgotten his mask and is borrowing one); therefore when 20 divers are tallied as having returned, the boat departs.

Daniel and Susan rise to the surface, and at first they can’t believe the boat has left, thinking maybe they’ve drifted. But as the hours and hours pass with no boat, tension mounts considerably. Even though they can sometimes see other boats, the distance is too great to swim – and their cries are unheard.

I waited and waited for the main focus of the film (that is, the moment when they realize they’re stranded), but by then I wasn’t as interested in the main characters. They seemed like appealing people, but I could never get it out of my mind that they were actors. And that’s the problem – movies like this need to be ultrarealistic to draw the audience in. Because everything was so drawn out, it was almost as if we the audience were being manipulated: Something’s going to happen, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, ad infinitum.

Our heroes face exhaustion, hunger, cold, and illness; there are appearances by sharks, sharks, sharks, and some other fish you won’t care much about. There’s bickering and whininess and insane rantings. These are all plausible elements, of course, but I still wasn’t drawn into the plot.

The movie was made for a pittance, and it shows; director Chris Kentis also wrote, edited and co-filmed. By consolidating the duties, though, Kentis gave us four subpar work performances. The movie seemed paced too slowly, which allowed suspense to peter out, rather than build up; the shots weren’t particularly creative, even given the limited setting. Even worse, though, was the soundtrack, which was intermittently pointless and intrusive. There were times when I’d hear some reggae or calypso music and think it was coming from an approaching boat, while the camera lingered on Daniel’s and Susan’s faces for a few minutes. It as only after a little while that I realized it was simply part of the soundtrack.

Open Water is real thumb-twaddler of a movie. Despite its promotion as a scary, suspenseful movie, only the ending itself is suspenseful; the rest is pretty predictable, telegraphed well in advance by an inexperienced filmmaker.

Open Water: *1/2 (out of four)