Under Paris (2024)

Netflix has delivered unto us a French shark picture, and it arrives with a conscience tucked beneath its fin. The film opens on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where a mako named Lilith has grown suspiciously large and, presumably, suspiciously angry. Three years later she is navigating the Seine, having mutated to tolerate fresh water and, in a development that strains the genre's already generous patience, reproducing by parthenogenesis. The environmental argument is present and accounted for: warming waters, plastic waste, a creature shaped by human negligence. It is also entirely in service of scenes in which people are eaten. The sermon lasts only as long as it takes to reach the next severed limb.

The villain, refreshingly, is not the shark but the Mayor of Paris, a woman who refuses to cancel a triathlon because billions of euros and global prestige hang in the balance. The satire is pointed and unmistakably aimed at real French officials who promised a swimmable Seine ahead of the Olympics. This is the film's sharpest blade: an indictment of spectacle economics and the cheerful sacrifice of the public to the bottom line. That the mayor is female registers as casting, not thesis. She is a scold and a coward, and the film enjoys watching her drown.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The cast is a natural cross-section of contemporary France, with Black and North African performers in supporting roles, and the film asks nothing of them beyond competence. There is no romance, no identity, no interiority beyond grief. The rest is a creature feature with a mild case of civic outrage: competent, occasionally thrilling, and content to let the planet burn as long as the water looks good on camera.