Unquiet
Things

I have a deep and abiding fondness for stories where humans come face to face with the depths of the unknown and should-not-be-known. The ocean floor and deep space have always been perfect hunting grounds for this kind of existential dread. Think Event Horizon‘s hellish spaceship, Leviathan‘s mutating deep-sea creatures, or The Thing‘s parasitic alien infiltration. These are stories that understand the trespassing of somewhere we don’t belong, each explores the same terrifying question about what happens when human curiosity crests beyond the boundaries of safety and understanding. When someone whispers with that specific tremor of dread, “we’re not supposed to be here,” the words carry the raw electricity of human vulnerability. It’s a moment of existential recognition. Our fragile human consciousness brushes against something vast and incomprehensible. We are small. We are temporary. And somewhere in the darkness, something ancient and indifferent watches.

When author Ryan LaSala (The Honeys) posted about Underwater on Threads, sharing that, “I love this movie and I don’t think anyone has ever looked better in a film than Kristen Stewart and her little buzz cut and big oil rig worker jacket,” I thought, “huh.” But I saw that was in response to another post that this was a pretty good movie that came out five years ago, with an actual Cthulhu, and no one saw it. OK, now my interest was got! Intrigued by the promise of an overlooked cosmic horror, I dove in.

The film drops viewers immediately into chaos at a deep-sea drilling facility seven miles beneath the ocean’s surface. Kristen Stewart plays Norah, a mechanical engineer who becomes an unlikely survivor when the Kepler Station starts imploding around her. Pretty sure this happens not even ten minutes into the film, so it’s quite intense fairly early on. With escape pods gone and survival seeming impossible, she and a handful of other workers must trek across the ocean floor to another station, all while wearing pressurized suits that are barely designed for the journey.

What starts as a disaster film quickly becomes a creature feature, with the survivors discovering they’re not alone in the murky depths. The monsters are grotesque and menacing, with a finale that hints at something much larger and more terrifying lurking in the ocean’s unexplored regions. It’s a film that understands the primal fear of the unknown, moving at a breakneck pace with minimal character development but maximum tension.

I mentioned to Yvan that critics thought the film was derivative. He laughed and said, “The movie-going public loves ‘derivative’!” Hee hehehe, catty Yvan! But I don’t think he is wrong, his offhand comment spoke to how we return to the same narrative wells, finding comfort in tales that echo our deepest fears, in stories that remake our deepest anxieties with just enough variation to feel both strange and familiar. It feels true to me, anyway. I don’t know if this film was great, but I don’t care. I will always love a film like this.

I watched Underwater on Hulu.

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