Crew
Director – Christian Sesma, Screenplay – Chad Law & Josh Ridgway, Producers – Daemon Hillin & Simon Williams, Photography – Niccolo de la Fere, Music – Andy Fosberry, Visual Effects – CKVFX, Special Effects – Kaidtiyod Kasain, Prachid Krasian & Kanitta Masong, Art Direction – Hatiarat Suangkasem. Production Company – Hillin Entertainment/Mirror Productions/Ashland Hill Media Finance/Lipsync/Richmond Pictures/Benetone Films/Red Phoenix Productions/The Video Store, Inc./Seskri Film Inc..
Cast
Scout Taylor Compton (Cassidy Branham), Callum McGowan (Gregg Branham), Jon Seda (Jordan), Richard Dreyfuss (Seamus), Stuart Townsend (Daemon Benz), Annamaria DeMara (Nancy), David Gray (Ed), Lorena Sarria (Itsarra), Maverick Kang (Pierre)
Plot
Cassidy Branham and her husband Gregg are on holiday on Thailand. Cassidy is an oceanographer and the granddaughter of a celebrated marine biologist. She has traumatic issues going back to her childhood and seeing her father devoured by a shark. They have come to join others on a dive to search for treasure. However, when they dive on the wreck, one of the group Pierre is attacked and bitten by a shark. Just as they prepare to return to shore, they are visited by another boat where the captain Jordan comes on board, offering help. However, Jordan and his men are drug smugglers and take over the boat at gunpoint. To save them, Cassidy agrees to venture down in a shark cage to retrieve the drugs they have come to retrieve.
The Killer Shark film has been with us ever since Jaws (1975), which produced a great many copies. In the 2000s with the advent of Sharknado (2013), the killer shark film took a turn for the deliberately ridiculous. A more recent development has been a body of films about survival in shark infested waters with the likes of Great White (2021), Maneater (2022), The Requin (2022), Shark Bait (2022), Shark Waters (2022), The Black Demon (2023), Blind Waters (2023), The Last Breath (2024), Shark Warning (2024), Something in the Water (2024), Beast of War (2025), The Bay (2026), Chum (2026) and Deep Water (2026).
Into the Deep comes out amid a cluster of these films that all appeared within the same year where a group of civilians are coerced at gunpoint by criminals into diving into shark-infested waters to retrieve some loot. Others include Great White Waters (2025) from The Asylum and Sharknado director Anthony C. Ferrante, which has almost the same plot as this, and the Australian Fear Below (2025) with divers forced to venture into a shark-infested river to retrieve gold bullion.
The main problem that makes Into the Deep sink into the mediocre is that when we get down to the bottom of the ocean floor, the photography is incredibly murky. The sharks look quite convincing and there is a reasonable degree of tension engendered when the film places Scout Taylor Compton inside the shark cage being battered by sharks. It is just that everything looks as though it has been shot in a muddy tank.
The dramas up on the surface are not much better. Jon Seda makes for a weedy villain and lacks any of the charisma that such a role needs. Scout Taylor Compton, who has had reasonable genre presence ever since appearing as Laurie Strode in Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), is adequate, although gives the same performance she always does. She is never going to convince the world that she is an actress with a range. For some reason, she only gets second billing behind the almost completely unknown Callum McGowan as her husband, even though she is the lead character.
The most interesting cast name is Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss of course played Hooper in the quintessential killer shark film Jaws – indeed, is the only member of the Orca expedition still alive. Dreyfuss was 77 years old at the time Into the Deep came out. I had the suspicious he was suffering from Parkinson’s, seeing him move around so much every time he is on screen and a Google search confirms this. The most interesting part is the five-minute scene that Dreyfuss narrates as the end credits run where he makes a plea for shark conservation and the endangerment of shark species worldwide (largely by indiscriminate fishing or else killing sharks for shark fin soup). When you consider how Jaws created an entire genre of films that portray the shark a vicious predator, this almost feels like he is trying to go to the opposite extreme and make up for five decades of typecasting sharks (even if the rest of Into the Deep still buys into those cliches).
Christian Sesma has been directing action films and thrillers since the mid-2000s. Amid the twenty odd films he has put out, he has also made the horror films On Bloody Sunday (2007), Lost Time (2014), The Night Crew (2015) and the SF films Mind Blown (2016) and Doomsday Device (2017).
Trailer here