There are two distinct sub-genres of thriller that stick in my mind, which are the exorcism movie and the shark movie. Both had origins earlier than the 1970s I am sure, but neither seemed to be any kind of phenomenon or popular craze until The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975) came out. They seem a pair of distinct pair, because of course both were so commercially successful and culturally impactful that every movie like them sits inescapably in their respective shadows. If you’re committing a religious exorcism to the screen, you are either copying Friedkin’s film or you are deliberately straining to avoid it. The one thing you cannot do is simply ignore it. The same is true of Steven Spielberg and thrillers about sharks: Jaws simply worked so well that one cannot see a dorsal fin turn up in a movie without thinking about it.

This brings us to Andrew Traucki’s 2010 thriller The Reef, in which a group of five Australians board an expensive yacht, manage to scuttle it, and go swimming for a nearby island through shark-infested waters. The complications they face trying to get there, and the Great White that begins to slowly pick them off one by one, are so predictable as to not even qualify as spoiling the plot. Such carnage is, after all, not just predicted by its audience but actively demanded by them. The vicarious thrill of watching some innocent get dragged underwater in a fountain of blood is precisely what the audience watches a film like The Reef for.

To his credit Traucki does write a reasonably believable group of victims, and to theirs they generally play them a believable state of rising trauma. Damien Walsh-Howling, Gyton Grantley, Adrienne Pickering, Kieran Darcy-Smith, and particularly Zoe Naylor give the entire work a frisson of realism that a typical shark thriller lacks. Traucki also develops the crisis with remarkable patience, and the slow set-up and tension-building in the first half goes a long way in the second.

To realise the toothsome antagonist Traucki also leans heavily – and refrishingly – on underwater footage of actual Great White sharks. No amount of model work, CGI, or puppetry is ever going to do a better job than the real thing, and the widespread use of the genuine article helps to further cement the slightly more realistic edge of the film overall.

All in all, it is a much better production of Traucki’s than his later thriller Black Water: Abyss (2020), which I reviewed some time ago. This iteration of his “wild animal eats adventurers” cinematic universe is significantly more effective, intriguing, and enjoyable.

Of course the effectiveness only goes so far, and then the audience is thinking of Jaws again. There really are only so many ways a human cast can be menaced by a shark, and viewers are going to keep on individually enjoying watching it happen or they are going to tire and watching something else. Knowing which kind of viewer you are is going to calibrate the odds of you liking The Reef more than anything that is in the film itself.