The Black Demon (2023)

The Black Demon arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows which boxes it intends to tick and lacks the budget to tick them elaborately. A megalodon menaces a crumbling oil rig off Baja California, and the shark, we are told, is an instrument of the rain god Tlaloc, dispatched to punish those who despoil the earth. The cast is almost entirely Mexican and Latino, which reads as an honest consequence of the setting instead of a casting directive, though a white American lead still stands at the center holding the flashlight. The film's social conscience is real but modest, worn like a windbreaker over a creature feature.

Nixon Oil is the villain here, a corporation so predatory it could only exist in a screenplay. It conceals hazards through self-inspections, abandons its workers, and plots to scapegoat its own inspector for a spill it caused. The critique lands with the subtlety of a two-by-four, though the film never sustains it. Ines, the wife, digs up the ignored safety reports and becomes the conscience of the operation, a gesture toward female agency that stops short of any larger argument about the men who signed the paperwork. The locals resent the gringo inspector, and the film lets that resentment sit there, a mild postcolonial note in a movie mostly about teeth.

Where the film does commit is the environment. The spill, the silenced warnings, the sacrificial sealing of the leak: ecological ruin is the engine of the plot, and the shark is less a monster than a collection of grievances with fins. The sermonizing, however, comes and goes. Critics found the ideas shallow and never built upon, and they were right. There is no body positivity, no neurodivergence, no LGBTQ presence, no rewriting of the historical record. What remains is a lean B-movie with a guilty conscience, occasionally preaching, mostly chomping. It is daft, it is sincere, and it is over before the sermon can find a second act.