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100Worth a dozen "Blair Witch Projects," with much more harrowing psychology and pithy dialogue. It's a bone-chilling plunge into no-holds-barred storytelling.
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100Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.
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100The nagging desire to help these people underscores the involvement of the audience in this superbly told story. You can almost taste the saltwater, and the fear.
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100In spirit, Open Water reduces us to children peering through our fingers, waiting for the horrid deliverance we're not quite sure we want to see.
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88The ending -- a more devastating surprise than "The Village" could manage -- caps eighty sweat-job minutes of imaginative, jolting suspense.
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88Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. Open Water had that effect on me.
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88Open Water may not be a pristine or complex suspense thriller, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anything else as terrifyingly potent in such a tiny package.
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80Terrifying precisely because it doesn't go in for cheesy shock tactics and special effects. (Those sharks are REAL.)
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80A tour-de-force thriller that deftly transforms its low-budget limitations into spectacular assets.
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80Rarely have the dangers of drifting apart been given such a visceral and genuinely upsetting emotional wallop.
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Superlative chiller.
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A slow drip, but one all the more intense for its Gothic minimalism and its underlying parable of naturalistic determinism: It's no fun to fool with Mother Nature.
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75While immersed in the horror of their plight, you might forget to breathe.
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75There's more terror than entertainment here, though. I've seen a lot of movies in my life I couldn't wait to see end; this may be the first good one.
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75It offers genuine scares and chills without the self-aware, packaged feel of many horror/thriller films.
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75The year's most unsettling movie experience - and in this case, that's a very good thing.
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75A fascinating experiment in both filmmaking technology and narrative style, but one that can be counted a success only in limited ways.
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70Could develop a cult following. But it is hard to envision repeat viewings or any great number of people willing, even vicariously, to undergo the couple's ordeal.
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70Kentis and Lau succeed in doing what all filmmakers worth their salt strive to do: They make us care about their characters.
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70An expertly made suspense thriller based on an actual incident, but on a visceral level it's about as much fun as watching someone pull the wings off a butterfly.
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Open Water, which was made for $130,000 -- and seemingly without special-effects assistance -- proves you don't have to have a big budget to have an audience on the edge of its seat.
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63Unlike "Jaws," Open Water isn't much for traditional popcorn-movie scares. Instead, the movie is more interested in depicting the gradual deterioration of its protagonists' sanity, and how that affects their relationship.
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63The actors are unknowns, but Ryan does a lot with her little downturned mouth. There are as many shades of anxiety as there are shades of blue in the sea, and Ryan manages to find them all.
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63Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.
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63The movie is also banal in ways that are irritating and second-rate.
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60The film's dispassionate examination of the shifts in Susan and Daniel's relationship as they drift from irritation to barely suppressed panic is at least as nerve wracking.
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60Every hour that ticks by your stomach drops a little more as the outlook becomes more bleak.
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60This isn’t your average against-the-odds survival story.
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60It's moderately compelling drama, but also fairly static stuff, image-wise.
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60The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.
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50I longed for something - anything - unexpected to occur. What I wouldn't have given for Wilson, the "Cast Away" volleyball, to float past with his bloody "face" print grinning at the pair!
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By no means a good movie. Although based on a true story, the mathematical error that led to Daniel and Susan's predicament is handled with such dramatic slovenliness that the viewer is apt to be confused as to what actually happened.
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50Writer-director Chris Kentis has dreamed up an ingenious premise, but he botches its execution. Every once in a while, the film stumbles upon a twist that ratchets up the tension, but then haphazardly discards it.
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50This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.
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40Ultimately, it's 79 minutes of footage of a pair of petty, pretty people freaking out over having to go to the bathroom in their wetsuits, and in the end you find yourself rooting for the sharks.
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40Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.
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30Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.
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30These dramatic shortfalls make us merely worried that two human beings are in danger, but not two compelling souls. There's your missing ingredient, the human X-factor.