The Bay (2012)

Barry Levinson, a director with a shelf of statuettes and a durable fondness for Maryland, turns to the found footage horror picture with the grim efficiency of a man who has read the market reports. The Bay assembles cell phone clips, Skype calls, and dashboard cameras into an account of a small town undone by mutant isopods breeding in water fouled by chicken farm runoff. The conceit is tidy. The menace is small, wet, and numerous.

The film's conscience is environmental, and it wears that conscience openly. Levinson claimed the material was eighty percent factual, and the screenplay obliges by indicting agribusiness for the steroids and the excrement, then indicting the government for the quarantine, the silence, and the payoff checks handed to survivors. The sermon arrives through lesions and screaming instead of a podium, which is the kinder method of delivery. A female reporter narrates the recovered footage, and a Black oceanographer is among the first to sound the alarm, though the film treats these details as staffing decisions, not statements. The town dies together, with no commentary on who comprised it.

What the film declines to bother with is nearly as instructive. There is no romance to distract from the parasites, no identity politics competing with the chitin, no redemptive arc for the body, which is treated here as a host and nothing more. We are left with a cautionary tale that works best when it stops explaining itself. The isopods, at least, have no agenda beyond appetite. In a genre crowded with messaging, that is almost restful. Ebert called it a faux eco-documentary and meant it as a complaint. He was correct on the classification.