Yuck. Just yuck. And ewww. And yuck.

I'm sorry, but that's entertainment?

Somewhere around the one-hour mark, I wrote, "Wow, I can't believe they got outta this!" I mean, you figure at least one of them survives because otherwise how could the director present this story like a docudrama, as if he knows what happened?

Two things in Open Water are the stuff of nightmares—as spooky/sickening as the final scenes of The Blair Witch Project. The shots of the couple at midnight as more and more sharks circle—the sea, the tails, the faces visible only in the flashes of lightning. Ghastly. But worse, much worse, are the final moments, when Susan lets go of Daniel and he drifts away. Oh, we think, he's dead. But then, suddenly, he moves. Oh, we think, he's not dead: Good! Then we notice something jumpy and unnatural about those movements. Oh, his body is being eaten from below. Susan's last moments of calm are devastating, too: not ordinary in the slightest.

But it is, as I've said, the ordinariness of the set-up and the determined lack of flash that makes Open Water so upsetting and, finally, so ugly. We don't have the cozy consolation of a real story here. We have simply been induced into identifying with two people who, for no memorable reason (which is, in the context of a movie, I suppose, memorable) are swallowed by the sea.

I suppose it is good to be reminded that, unlike in the movies, not everyone who gets into sticky situations gets out of them. Something to contemplate as we go about planning our summer vacations.

Oh, yeah: Yuck.