Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Ray Pride

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Lions Gate picked up Open Water after seeing the film on Friday and then making a preemptive bid on Saturday, working all night to get the deal on paper before the press screening of the movie on Sunday afternoon. As it turns out, the film is the best of the small festival pick-ups the studio has made and gotten behind in recent years.

It's not going to be an easy sell. It is a quiet, smart, romantic thriller that doesn't have the magic tricks that CG has brought to all nature-based films in recent years. But it has a good heart and a strong, simple story that most people will connect to. It's almost the same thing as Jaws not having a working shark during production, forcing Spielberg to rely a bit more on suspense over raw visceral thrills.

I don't want to tell you much about this movie and I hope you will avoid much outside input before you see the film when Lions Gate releases the film this summer. Like Edge of America, you kind of know the territory well enough to figure much of it out, but not… things are different than you expect, even of they are not revelations.

One of the outstanding things about the film… and it is a weird thing to be pointing out, so bear with me… but there is frontal nudity by both leads, male & female, in this low-budget film, which is something you almost never see. It's not that the nudity here makes the movie better. Truth be told, it's a little irrelevant. But it is truthful. Lovers who go on vacation sleep together in the nude. People most often do not have sex while the woman wears a tank-top or bra. But that is one of those indie things that tends to take you out of a film, reminding you of the negotiations that go into actresses exposing themselves that way. The Bertolucci is still coming up, but that's Bertolucci. Likewise, Margueritte Moreau's willingness to tell and show the naked truth of her character in Easy, without building a career and then exposing herself for a big payday, is one of the reliefs of that film. Ms. Moreau is cute and sexy and all that, but it is not ogling that makes the choice so attractive. It's that the straight-forwardness that relaxes the audience into the suspension of disbelief that almost every movie is trying to achieve.

by David Poland

Open Water
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Director: Chris Kentis

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Country: USA
Year: 2003
Time: 79 minutes
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Cast - Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis, Saul Stein, Estelle Lau


Screenwriter - Chris Kentis
Producer - Laura Lau
Cinematographers - Chris Kentis, Laura Lau
Editor - Chris Kentis