Review: The Requin

Director: Le-Van Kiet

Screenplay: Le-Van Kiet

Year: 2022

Something that annoys me a lot about some movies is when the marketing team manages to attract the viewer's attention with something not so significant in their film. This is the case of “The Requin” which was promoted with an impressive poster where it makes you think that huge sharks will stalk the leading couple for most of the movie. This message could not be more distant from reality.

In "The Requin" a married couple is going through a difficult time that has brought them to the brink of divorce. After a late-stage pregnancy loss, neither has been able to recover from the blow. To rebuild their relationship, both go on vacation to Vietnam, where a strong storm leaves them shipwrecked in the sea, fighting against the natural elements.

Instead of a shark movie, “The Requin” is really a marital drama that turns into a struggle to survive a harsh environment when they get caught in the middle of the sea. It is worth mentioning that there are sharks in the film, and they are important in the plot, but their participation is reduced to about ten minutes of its approximately 90-minute duration. On the other hand, the poster suggests that these will be present as a constant threat.

Evaluating "The Requin" as a film, there is not much positive to highlight either. What stands out first is how uneven all its elements are. For example, the visuals alternate between gorgeous shots of tropical Vietnamese scenery, underwater scenes that look like they're taken from some marine life documentary, and horrific scenes of embarrassing CGI that seem generated from graphics available two decades ago.

Its uneven quality issues are not limited to the visuals but extend to the performances and the script. The performances are decent, and at times we witness stretches of great performances, but at other times the performances are lousy. The opposite happens with the script, in general, it is quite bad, but they have some moments where some good ideas stand out.

“The Requin” is nothing more than a bad survival movie trying to generate public interest by pretending to be a shark movie. Its quality is quite uneven in all its aspects, but unfortunately, it stands out more how much it does more than how little it does well.