Bait (2012)

There is a certain purity to a film like Bait, and it deserves acknowledgment. A tsunami floods an Australian supermarket. A great white shark is inside the supermarket. People must avoid the shark. This is the entire proposition, stated plainly, and the film honors it with a commitment that borders on the monastic. No character pauses mid-crisis to educate the audience about structural injustice. No subplot exists to illuminate a social ill. The robber, the shoplifter, the estranged ex, the security guard: these are genre furniture, arranged for maximum chomping, and the film treats them as such.

The cast is an ensemble of telegenic Australians, assembled for their capacity to scream underwater. Female characters survive, scheme, and are used as literal bait, and at no point does the screenplay suggest this constitutes a thesis about anything. The flooded aisles invite no reading about consumption or late capitalism, because the water is a plot mechanism and the shark is a shark. A shopping-cart suit of armor is deployed, which is either a metaphor or a shopping-cart suit of armor, and the film's disinterest in resolving the question is total. The tsunami arrives without any nod toward environmental catastrophe. It simply arrives, as weather does.

What remains is a lean, cheerfully grim contraption that premiered at Venice, out of competition, which is the correct placement for a film with no designs on the culture. It grossed thirty-two million on twenty, so somebody was pleased. We are left to classify it, and classification here is a brief exercise. Visceral, efficient, and entirely free of agenda, it asks nothing of us but attention to the waterline. There are worse contracts. There are also more instructive ones, but this one, at least, does not lecture.