Movie Review The Reef: Stalked

It’s coming up on five decades since the release of (potentially) cinemas all-time greatest blockbuster, Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws.

And yet we’re still infatuated with the nightmare-fuelling fish; shark thrillers have populated the bargain bins of the late Blockbuster Videos (and now supermarkets) since time immemorial. The shark thriller became its own subgenre of horror in the chum-filled wake of the Orca, and the imitators keep surfacing to this day, hoping to catch a morsel of that success.

But the stumble for most shark schlock – where they end up dead in the water – is that they focus on the fish.

Jaws isn’t about the shark.

The shark is a sparingly used story beat; it drives together our three, starkly different main characters. Now that might be the conceit of a story critiquing capitalism, but the idea still rings true.

The best of the horror genre in recent years have employed that trop: there’s a ‘monster behind the monster’.

In the case of Andrew Traucki’s film, The Reef: Stalked, the shark doesn’t represent capitalism or class war; the shark represents domestic violence and the post-traumatic stress disorder that comes with it.

A sequel to The Reef, Traucki’s 2010 feature film, The Reef: Stalked is another Bowen-filmed shark story, but one that this time employs an almost entirely female cast to battle a hefty shark near the Great Barrier Reef.

The past shapes this story where, after witnessing her sister's horrific murder by an abusive partner, who drowned her in her own bathtub, Teressa Liane’s Nic travels to a tropical resort with her friends for a kayaking excursion – one which inevitably goes wrong.

Only hours in, the women are stalked and then attacked by – you guessed it - a great white shark, and Nic must overcome her post-traumatic stress to survive.

For a shark thriller with fifty-years of well-worn track behind it, The Reef: Stalked is a competent suspense horror with an admirable treatise on domestic violence – and certainly one Bowen audiences will enjoy knowing many of its scenes took place at Queens Beach.

The Reef: Stalked opens at Bowen Summergarden Cinema on Friday, August 12 at 6:45pm.

Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked was filmed in Bowen over six weeks, and will release at the Summergarden Cinema in early August

Image: Declan Durrant