A surprise streaming smash that as of August 2024 looks set to become Netflix’s most watched foreign language movie. The reason for the popularity of UNDER PARIS/Sous la Seine (2024) isn’t hard to fathom: the Paris Olympics occurred around the time of its premiere, and featured swimming competitions held in the Seine, which is also something that occurs in UNDER PARIS—here, though, sharks invade and the city is eventually flooded.
UNDER PARIS (2024) Trailer
The most obvious inspiration was JAWS, but the film is structured more like one of that iconic hit’s most famous rip-offs: Joe Dante’s PIRANHA (1978). Unlike that film, UNDER PARIS isn’t good by any means, but there are worse ways to waste 104 minutes.
Sophia Assalas (Bérénice Bejo), a Paris based shark tracker, leads a diving team to the “seventh continent,” a.k.a. the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There they encounter several impossibly large female sharks who chomp the divers and nearly drown Sophia.
Three years later Sophia, who’s back in Paris, learns that Lilith, one of the sharks she’s been tracking, is loose in the Seine. The source for this info is an environmental activist named Mika (Léa Léviant) who seeks to protect Lilith, and in so doing delivers the requisite environmental message; unchecked pollution, it seems, has caused Lilith to mutate in horrific ways.
Not that the messaging is allowed to get in the way of the scares, as at around the halfway point Mika gets eaten by Lilith. This critter has been subsiding in a flooded catacomb beneath Paris and birthed a litter of fast-growing sharklets that (like the mutated Piranhas of PIRANHA) threaten to vacate their immediate surroundings and infest the world’s oceans. Together with the hunky Sergeant Adil (Nassim Lyes), Sophia informs the mayor (Anne Marivin) of the trouble beneath the city, but she, not wanting to interfere with the Olympics, elects to hush it up. Sophia and Adil go rogue and attempt to blow up the sharks’ den, but have to contend with a triathlon occurring in the Seine, and also the fact that the river floor is littered with unexploded shells left over from the last world war…
In the lexicon of killer shark movies UNDER PARIS, directed by Xavier Gens (of FRONTIER(S) and THE DIVIDE) doesn’t stand out, offering nothing particularly novel or interesting. The narrative is a cliché-fest and the CGI-heavy shock scenes are obvious and overdone; they tend to be accompanied by loud music cues, and often involve convenient plot contrivances, as when Sophia’s shark scanner shorts out just as the filmmakers are looking to build suspense, or when these apparently very discerning sharks choose to bite some people but not others (meaning supporting players can always be counted on to be menaced while the heroine is left alone).
There’s no point going into the acting (by Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo and a highly photogenic supporting cast) or the quality of the special effects, as both, you can rest assured, are fully in keeping with the film overall: competent but unspectacular. The apocalyptic finale, in which Paris is threatened by a much greater (and more realistic) menace than sharks, at least offers some mean-spirited enjoyment, proving that a rousing ending can do wonders for a mediocre film.
Another thing this film proves is that, contrary to the haughty sophistication French cinema is supposed to represent, gallic filmmakers are capable of turning out movies every bit as trashy and outrageous as those on my side of the Atlantic.
Vital Statistics
UNDER PARIS
Netflix
Director: Xavier Gens
Producer: Vincent Roget
Screenplay: Yannick Dahan, Maud Heywang, Xavier Gens
Cinematography: Nicolas Massart
Editing: Riwanon Le Beller
Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant, Sandra Parfait, Aksel Ustun, Aurélia Petit, Marvin Dubart, Daouda Keita, Ibrahima Ba, Anne Marivin, Stéphane Jacquot, Jean-Marc Bellu, Nagisa Morimoto, Yannick Choirat, Iñaki Lartigue, Victor Pontecorvo, Thomas Espinera, Anaïs Parello