The Requin (2022)

The Requin works best when you stop expecting a nonstop shark carnival and let it pull you into something leaner and meaner: a survival thriller where the ocean itself feels like an antagonist with endless patience. Le Van Kiet keeps the tension simmering in a sun-bleached, storm-battered vibe, and Alicia Silverstone grounds the ordeal with a raw, weary resolve that makes the danger feel uncomfortably close. It’s the kind of movie that finds its scares in exposure, exhaustion, and the awful arithmetic of time running out, with the sharks as a circling punctuation mark rather than the whole sentence. If you want a character-driven, at-sea pressure cooker with some grisly jolts (and can roll with a few rough edges), it’s a surprisingly gripping watch.

The Requin is clearly aiming for a survival-thriller that mixes grief-driven drama with open-water shark peril, and on paper that’s a solid, pulpy setup. In practice, the emotional beats are pushed so hard they start to feel like soap opera, and the story asks you to swallow a lot of implausible decisions and conveniences just to keep the ordeal going. The shark moments should be the main event, but the CGI often looks too artificial to be scary, which undercuts the tension and can tip scenes into unintentional comedy. If you’re here for grounded survival realism or genuinely terrifying creature horror, this may waste your time, but if you can tolerate B-movie logic and you just want Alicia Silverstone fighting the elements in a breezy, undemanding thriller, it’s passable background viewing.