The following review contains some spoilers for Hulu’s Something in the Water (2024).

Something in the Water is a shark attack movie that opens with a human attack. Girlfriends Meg and Kayla walk in an alley together at night. When a group of other women clock that they’re holding hands, they begin to taunt them, one calling them “fucking dykes.” Meg wants to just keep walking, but Kayla throws up her middle fingers at the girl, inviting danger in. The group turns violent, throws Meg down the stairs, and begins to beat her up.

Years later, Meg and Kayla are broken up and estranged, but their mutual friend LIzzie’s destination wedding throws them back together. Meg is still dealing with PTSD from the attack, relying on an anxiety app to get through her days. Lizzie and the rest of their close friend group, Ruth and Cam, conspire to get Meg and Kayla to make up and process the past. What starts as a fun little pre-wedding boat excursion for the five women turns into a forced lesbianintervention when the group strands Meg and Kayla on their own side of a remote island to make them talk it out. And then the lesbianintervention turns into a shark attack.

Like many shark attack horror films, Something in the Water follows a slasher structure, the shark picking off the girls one by one as things increasingly go awry in their efforts to escape. For the majority of the film, the characters are floating in the middle of the ocean with only one life jacket and one knife between them. As a result, watching the film feels a lot like treading water, the tension rapidly increasing and the vastness of the ocean somehow both suffocating and colossal. You feel like you’re literally immersed alongside the characters. Tonally though, the film is a bit confused. Like when Lizzie exclaims “You brought us to shark infested waters the day before my wedding?!”, it’s unclear if it’s played intentionally for laughs. (But trust I do need a tank top that says it.) Something in the Water is no Jaws, but it also is no Sharknado, at times very self-serious and at others goofy in a way that doesn’t quite arrive at full camp.

The opening is so intense, so bleak in its portrayal of danger, risk, and violence, and the rest of the film just doesn’t match that or manage to make what should be quite straightforward connections between the different violences shown in the film. The cast is diverse, but race doesn’t play a role in the storytelling at all, which is a misfire. Kayla is white, and Meg is brown, and there’s never any acknowledgment of the role racial dynamics would play in Kayla’s decision to taunt the girls in the alleyway, which then leads to them beating up Meg. Kayla’s whiteness and her willingness to take that risk and put her girlfriend at risk, too, are connected, but the film avoids any textual grappling with that connection. Meanwhile, when we flash forward to the wedding weekend, Kayla is portrayed as this passive character, while Cam — who is Asian — is all of a sudden the big risk taker in the group. Something in the Water squashes any opportunity to tell a deeper story about race and danger and is ultimately overly sympathetic to Kayla. And it falls back on old slasher tropes, too, killing off Ruth, the only Black girl in the group, first. It’s a frustrating example of a movie that has queer main characters but feels too traditional in its storytelling.

The shark sequences are scariest when we can’t see much of the shark at all, restraint Something in the Water manages for much of the film but then throws out the window in the final act. There are some interesting and effective direction choices, and I do love that so much of the movie takes place in the middle of the ocean, But aside from Hiftu Quasem as Meg, who is fantastic throughout, the performances lack the verve necessary to hold the weight of the life-or-death stakes. Something in the Water gives us lesbian final girls, but that would feel more like a win if the film coupled its by-the-numbers slasher formula with some richer, deeper character moments. There’s some commentary in there on climate change and wealth, but it’s doled out in clunky dialogue rather than integrated more organically into the story.

Still, it’s a mostly fun late-summer film, would likely go down easy with a drinking game. And even with all my criticisms, I do wish it had been released in theaters rather than a streamer — specifically in 4DX. Perhaps water and movement effects would help make up for its lackluster emotional stakes.

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