******SUMMER SHARK SPOILERS!******

I just did a column on shark movies with my recent rewatch of “JAWS,” but hey—it’s summer. And off and on since 1975, summer has meant summer shark movies. With the exception of Steven Spielberg’s legendary summer blockbuster “JAWS,” most shark flicks fall somewhere along the spectrum of disposable wastes of time (“Sharknado”) and mediocre action flicks (“Deep Blue Sea”), to the occasional higher-caliber breakout (“The Shallows”). 

This year’s entry, “Under Paris” (originally titled “Sous le Seine”/“Under the Seine”) hails from the City of Lights and home of the 2024 Summer Olympics (of which the movie has a few things to say). The movie showcases some strong performances (Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant), some timely ecological/political commentary, and (for better or worse) the kind of broadly farcical action ending that folks seem to expect in a shark movie these days. The movie’s director, Xavier Gens (2007’s “Hitman”), shares cowriting credits along with (takes a breath) Yannick Dahan, Maud Heywang, Yaël Langmann and Olivier Torres, from an original idea by Edouard Duprey and Sébastien Auscher (that’s a lot of chefs…).

For this review, my wife (a fellow shark movie enthusiast) and I watched the film through Netflix via our digital projector onto our 7 ft/2-meter collapsible screen; a decent approximation of a theatrical experience that definitely amplifies the spectacle for this kind of movie. 

“Under Paris”/ “Sous la Seine”

The movie opens with the deeply disturbing image of the all-too-real Great Pacific Garbage Patch; an artificial island of floating debris that has accumulated into a grotesque subcontinent.  Sophia Assalas (Bérénice Bejo) is a scientist chronicling the Patch with her husband Chris (Yannick Choirat) and their team of trained experts aboard a research vessel. 

During a dive, Chris comes face-to-snout with a previously tagged mako shark named Lilith, whom the team has tracked since adolescence. Attempting to take a blood sample, Chris makes the mistake of relaxing his guard around the shark, and she attacks him. The mako then slaughters the remaining dive team, as well.  Going against the advice of a fellow surviving crewmate, Sophia dives in without breathing gear in a futile attempt to rescue Chris, before encountering the hyper-aggressive Lilith. Sophia is then caught in a fishing net and quickly pulled down by the massive shark. At the last moment, she is able to free herself before nearly bleeding to death from a severe case of barotrauma.

Note: This powerful opening scene of Sophia watching helplessly as her husband and team are slaughtered by the large mako Lilith reminded me of Sigourney Weaver’s “Ripley” watching helplessly via remote cameras as a recon team of Colonial Marines get slaughtered by xenomorphs in 1986’s “ALIENS.”  Like Ripley, Sophia also rushes in where angels feared to tread. With her short hair and facial features, actress Bérénice Bejo (2011’s“The Artist”) also bears a subtle resemblance to a 1980s-era Sigourney Weaver (I’m guessing this might’ve been intentional).

Three years later, and we see Sophia giving guided tours to bratty school kids at a Paris aquarium. As the children Google their ‘tour guide’ with their phones, they tease her about losing her team in the Pacific. An older girl named Mika (Léa Léviant), who’s not with the tour group, mentions Lilith to get Sophia’s attention. After the tour, Sophia hears Mika out. Mika tells Sophia she’s hacked into Lilith’s tracking beacon, and that the shark is trapped in the Seine River. 

Note: Sophia’s demotion from marine biologist to aquarium tour guide reminds me of Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) from “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986); another marine biologist who also found herself giving tours at the fictional “Cetacean Institute” of the movie. Marine biologists don’t usually give tours—just saying.

Mika and her activist group plan to free Lilith by taking an illegal dive into the Seine. Sophia, not wanting to get involved, turns down her offer to help them. Later, in her apartment, Sophia watches video of Chris and her team from that fateful voyage three years earlier.  Sophia’s grief, guilt and curiosity eventually get the better of her and she decides to contact Mika.

Note: If my wife hadn’t mentioned it, I would’ve never noticed that Mika’s blue hair and yellow jacket made her look very much like a bitter, angsty version of Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” (2009), and I honestly couldn’t shake that image for the rest of the movie. Mika feels like an amalgam of climate activist and author Greta Thunberg (and many other angry young Gen Zs) who are understandably bitter with the world they’ve inherited from their careless parents and grandparents.

At the Seine, we’re introduced to young Parisian policeman Adil (Nassim Lyes) and his partner, Nils (Aksel Ustun), who catch two boys magnet-fishing, only to realize the boys have accidentally pulled up unexploded ordinance from World War 2. The Paris bomb squad is then called in to safely detonate it. Later that evening, Sophia, Mika and Adil unwittingly rendezvous at the Seine, when Adil’s boat patrol comes across Mika and her girlfriend, Ben (Nagisa Morimoto), and foil their plan.  Sophia then steps forward and offers to help the police find the shark, which draws skepticism from the police until they learn of Sophia’s credentials, and of the transponder attached to Lilith.  The next morning, Sophia and the police follow the shark’s transponder signal using Sophia’s laptop, only to have it shut down remotely by Mika and Ben; who are misguidedly trying to ‘save’ Lilith from being killed by the police. 

Note: The movie does some excellent PR for the Paris police, as we see Adil and Nils casually chatting up with some older unhoused men who are caught illegally fishing along the Seine, but are simply talked to, and joked with; unlike the overreactions of some US police officers we often see captured on video (watch: YouTube’s “Audit the Audit” channel). 

With Sophia having successfully made her case about a shark living in the river to Adil, they present their evidence to the Mayor of Paris (Anne Marivin), who is only interested in good publicity for her city during the forthcoming Olympic Games, including the planned triathlon swimming event in the ‘restored’ Seine river (a real-life project spanning the past decade, at a cost of billions of euros). The mayor refuses to postpone the planned triathlon swim, to avoid any bad press when the world’s attention will be so focused on the Paris games. Mika and Ben decide not to wait for Sophia or the mayor, and they release a video telling the world of Lilith’s presence in the river.  Oops…

Note: The mayor is an amalgam of Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) from “JAWS” and the current real-life mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who recently took a test dive in the Seine after it was declared ‘safe’ for human swimming for the first time in over a century.  Some real-life Parisians see the renovation of the Seine River for the Olympics as either a tremendous waste of money; using this newfound climatological conscience only for Olympic publicity, and not actual public safety. 

Still trying to ‘save’ Lilith, Mika and her group (which has grown since her leaked video) reactivate the transponder signal, and head to the city’s waste water reservoir, where Mika sets up a rhythmic, thumping beacon (shades of “Dune”) to lure Lilith out of her hiding place in order to ‘free’ the large mako shark from the catacombs. Sophie, Adil and a few police officers arrive as well.  As Mika swims out into the middle of the reservoir chamber, they crowd notices a juvenile shark swimming with its mother, Lilith.  Sophie realizes that the reservoir and connecting catacombs are not just hiding places—it’s a nesting area for this new subspecies of mako shark, which has somehow adapted to a freshwater environment.

Note: That is, if one can call the polluted water of the Seine ‘fresh water.’ The question of how a mako shark was swimming in fresh water was nagging at me as I watched the movie, since only Spear Tooth, Pondicherry, Greenland, Ganges and Bull sharks are known to swim in both salt and fresh water. However, the movie does address that question later on. 

Ignoring her friends’ warnings, Mika reaches out to pet the smaller shark (a phenomenally bad idea) and is attacked by Lilith, who rises out of the water with Mika clenched in her jaws. Soon, all hell breaks loose, as Lilith kills her own offspring, and begins an all-out attack on everyone in the reservoir.  In their mass panic to exit through the narrowing catacombs, several people are killed, including Mika’s girlfriend Ben, and some police officers, including Adil’s friend, Leopold (Daouda Keita). 

Note: The shot of Lilith rising from the water, towards the camera, with Mika clenched in her jaws would’ve made for a great 3-D shot back in the 1980s, back when cheesy 3-D horror movies were briefly in vogue (“JAWS 3-D,” “Parasite,” “Friday the 13th, Part 3,” “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone,” etc). The effective catacombs/reservoir scene also has strong vibes of “Deep Blue Sea” (1999) and “ALIENS” (1986). As a claustrophobe, I found myself clenching my chair as the characters became bottlenecked in the catacombs. 

We then see Sophia at a hospital, as the casualties are brought in with various missing limbs.  It looks like a field hospital in a war zone; something veteran Adil intimately understands.  Sophia and Adil sit later return to the scene of the massacre to investigate.  There, they find the slain juvenile shark floating in the reservoir, and they take it back for a post-mortem.  During her examination, Sophia finds subtle mutations indicating this freshwater-adapted mako is part of a new species, of which Lilith is the mother.  Opening the dead creature’s belly, a litter of live unborn shark pups squirm out and flop onto the floor.  The juvenile was already carrying unborn pups before she reached sexual maturity, indicating this new species reproduces entirely by parthenogenesis.  The next day, they take this information to the mayor, who dismisses the seriousness of it.  The mayor tells Adil the military will be in charge of security, but she refuses to cancel the Olympic swimming triathlon. 

Note: The scenes with the Paris Mayor are right out of “JAWS” Mayor Vaughn’s playbook. Both mayors were presiding over major summer events (the 4th of July, the Summer Olympics) and both refused to do anything substantial to ensure the safety of the participants. There are also a few lines of dialogue pulled directly from “JAWS” (“A boat propeller? It’s happened before”). If you’re going to homage? Homage the best.

Realizing they’re on their own, Sophia and Adil recruit several police officers, including Nils, Caro (Sandra Parfait), and Adama (Ibrahima Ba) for a strictly “off the books” job.  The plan also employs police demolitions experts Poiccard (Stéphane Jacquot) and Berruti (Jean-Marc Bellu), as they hope to drive Lilith from her nursery and set off explosives.  The team bluff their way past military boat patrols, and lay down their explosives. 

Note: I have to give the movie serious kudos for being one of the few movies about Paris where the city is shown flaws and all; from its unhoused persons to the pollution of the Seine. This is not some romanticized travel brochure idealization of the city, and I appreciate such realism, even if used for a campy action-thriller.

As they prepare to set off the explosives, an entire school of juvenile sharks arrive—slaughtering the demolitions experts after they set and arm the explosives.  Adil manages to detonate the charges, killing most of the juveniles, but Lilith manages to slip away and capsize the police boat—killing Caro and Markus, before heading out to the where the triathlon is taking place.  Adil and Sophia barely manage to climb onto the capsized boat’s hull for whatever safety they can. 

Note: Lilith is this movie’s answer to the queen xenomorph seen in “ALIENS,” except that this mother of her species doesn’t seem to give a damn for her offspring; only her own survival, no matter the cost. 

What follows next is the sort of over-the-top disaster everyone but the mayor was trying to avoid; Lilith enters the triathlon area and the swimmers are yanked underwater one-by-one in a dark-humored, but cartoonish sequence.  The military come in with their boats and automatic weapons and begin opening fire on Lilith—blindly shooting automatic weapons into the river, and ignoring all of that undetonated ordinance from World War 2 littering the river bottom.  Soon, all hell breaks loose, as the rippling underwater explosions blow several bridges apart, with water flooding into the city.  The mayor, of course, is tossed into the shark-filled waters and fittingly eaten by Lilith—the very threat she chose to ignore.  The majestic city of Paris is submerged…

Note: To paraphrase Hooper from “JAWS,” the Mayor ignored this particular problem until it “swam up and bit her in the ass.” The undetonated ordinance was set up earlier in the film, with the two boys fishing with magnets, but it’s hard to believe there was enough live ordinance left in the Seine to destroy ALL of Paris.  This is where the film got a little too broadly farcical for me, as it drifted into “Sharknado” territory. It is my least favorite sequence of this otherwise nicely-made shark thriller. 

Adil and Sophia swim over to a nearby rooftop sticking out above the floodwaters of Paris.  As they catch their breaths, they see Lilith’s large fin… along with a school of pup fins as well.  As the end credits roll, we see maps and live graphs showing the worldwide spread of this new breed of shark—which is geared for fresh and salt water—using both oceans and rivers to penetrate deep into London, New York, Bangkok, etc. 

Note: The movie’s end credits are much like the killer virus spread seen during the end credits of 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”

Fin (sorry not sorry…)

Summing It Up

“Under Paris” has a few stronger-than-expected characters and some effective low-budget filmmaking that ground this otherwise silly B-action/horror movie, which also takes a few well-earned jabs at the inept handling of our global ecological crisis.  Like the evolved makos seen in the film, the movie mutates over its 100 minutes, going from well-acted, ecology-messaging horror movie to broad action farce in its over-the-top climax. Fortunately, the characters keep things grounded just enough for a viewer to remain emotionally invested.

For a shark-themed B-movie, “Under Paris” falls somewhere between 2016’s superior “The Shallows” and the mildly-diverting “The Meg” (2018), though it’s nowhere near the classic status of Steven Spielberg’s inimitable “JAWS” (1975), which it cleverly homages.  Unlike campier shark movie spoofs, like the obnoxious “Sharknado” series, “Under Paris” rewards its viewers with a teaspoon of intelligence (addressing some nagging questions about the sharks), a few genuine thrills (the tense catacombs sequence), and some ecological commentary without cheap or glibly-offered ‘solutions.’ 

“Under Paris” is not trying to be the next “JAWS,” nor even the next great horror movie; but with a few strong performances, effective low-budget filmmaking, well-meaning commentary and an admittedly over-the-top ending that brings down the house (and the city), it’s certainly not the worst way to kill 100 minutes with a bucket of popcorn. 

To the inevitable sequel already rumored to be in the works? Allons-y…

Where to Watch

In the United States, “Under Paris” is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix. International markets may vary. The movie has not yet been released on physical media (DVD/Blu-Ray) as of this writing.