‘I think it is every girl’s dream to be Miss Crustacean...’
Renowned director Barry Levinson is best known for his prestige dramas in the ’80s and ’90s like Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man and Disclosure. The Bay is his only foray into horror which is a shame because he clearly has a knack for it. Utilising the found footage genre in a way that is innovative, chilling and compelling, The Bay was inspired by an abandoned documentary Levinson had started shooting about pollution in the Chesapeake River and according to the director, 80% of the information provided in The Bay is factually accurate. Now, that is terrifying…
Presented as a faux documentary made up of archive footage, interviews and news reels, as well as a bunch of stuff shot on mobile phones and other devices, The Bay uses many characters to tell its story, some of them appear sparingly, others have more prominent roles such as Stephen Kunken as the increasingly overwhelmed Dr. Abrams and Kether Donohue as rookie reporter Donna Thompson.
What makes The Bay so damn effective is how convincing it is, both as a ‘documentary’ but also as a plausible scenario. There is an eerie prescience to the film now we live in a world in which polluted water is becoming a real problem in the developed world. While never overly didactic, the message of corporate greed and institutional corruption is ever present, but Levinson never loses sight of the fact that his primary aim is to entertain and shock his audience. The mixture of eco and body horror is a heady one, and there are some moments here that I found genuinely tough to sit through. One of the most effective and frightening scenes is a simple combination of a grimy, static shot of the exterior of a house with audio over the top describing the suffering of the infected and dying inside the house. Nightmarish stuff.
Mileage will vary with The Bay depending on one’s tolerance for the found footage genre but I found it to be a captivating and genuinely unsettling film that makes me hope that Levinson will return to horror one day – stay away from the water.
