By Keri O’Shea
I have to say, I was somewhat blind-sided by the press release for The Bay – enough so that it completely took my mind off the fact that I was about to watch a found footage film, a sub-genre I have ranted about at length in the past. Perhaps this was even deliberate, a way of diverting attention from that fact. Lemme see: The Bay is brought to us by the producers of Sinister (fine) and Insidious (also makes sense) and…the director of Rain Man. Hang on, the director of Rain Man? I’ll admit it, that did give me pause for thought. To be fair to Barry Levinson, he hasn’t leapt straight from a heart-warming story of a man with autism to the horror genre – but, actually, he hasn’t had all that much to do with horror either, so I was interested to see what I was going to get here.
It turns out that Levinson’s plentiful experience as a director, regardless of what he’s directed, set him up rather nicely to make a pretty good job of The Bay. And, of course, there’s the fact that despite the style of filming, someone bothered to write a script, come up with a plot and cast real actors, which some of the worst found footage offenders still believe they are exempt from doing. Let’s not get me started on that again, though…onto the film at hand.
The Bay’s set-up is thus: a once-wannabe news reporter, Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) is working with a Wikileaks-style website to compile a film detailing the events of July 4th, 2009, in the Maryland coastal town of Claridge. This framing device neatly – and mercifully – allows The Bay to have a good explanation for all the careful editing, ordering and ongoing discussion of these events as we are shown them. Donna explains that she is a survivor of that day – cue footage of people all having a lovely time by the water, which as we all know can never end well in a horror film – and that she feels unable to move on with her life until she’s gotten closure by blasting through the cover-up now in operation, hence her collaboration with the site. She then talks us through the events of 07/04/09, which she saw first-hand as a rookie reporter for a local news channel.
Unbeknownst to the townspeople all enjoying their Independence Day that day, some weeks previously two oceanographers had tried to raise an alarm about the bay’s ecology, as agricultural dumping had seemingly damaged the ecosystem there and was flooding the bay area with pollutants. They never got very far with their concerns; the mayor’s office ignored their evidence, and later, their bodies were recovered from the water…then, bang on cue, the locals all start developing painful boils and lesions – symptoms which rapidly escalate…
Okay, I don’t think I’ll be too guilty of spoilers, considering the film’s title, cover art and very earliest set-up, if I say that There’s Something In The Water. The Bay hasn’t revolutionised the horror genre through its subject matter to be fair, and some of what you see in the film will feel pretty familiar. However, it gets a pass nonetheless because it’s handled very well. The set-up makes sense, and enough time is taken to craft a believable town with believable people that, when the horror does unfold, it feels just as believable. The panic, the reluctance on the part of the townsfolk to get near anyone who appears ill, even if they’re frightened and in pain, and the escalating tension, well, it all seemed authentically how people would (and do) behave in times of crisis.
The Bay is also careful to hold out on its explication. I spent the first half an hour or more anticipating some sort of zombie action, or zombies-by-another-name maybe, as in 28 Days Later; the film’s forté is that it avoids this. People remain confused about what’s happening, whereas that would all soon melt away if they were suddenly chased by half-rabid virus carriers. Instead, the people of Claridge have to start guessing, sometimes wildly. This is much more creepy than a sudden outbreak of the undead, this partial and slow dissemination of information, as life goes on as normal just a few miles down the road, Claridge’s neighbours having no knowledge of what is unfolding. That events can be successfully covered up is horrific in its own right; it’s just the right side of plausible. That plausibility renders the big reveal of what is actually going on very humane. The Bay balances emotion with action, eeriness with (serious) ickiness, and it does it well. It’s economical, too, coming in at less than eighty-five minutes. See, it can still be done.
Perhaps The Bay felt like such an effective, if familiar-feeling horror story because it has arrived at a time when we’re all too aware of how dependent we are upon the authorities, and the vagaries of bureaucracy, for practically everything, right down to what we eat and drink. At the time of writing, the UK has just gone through paroxysms of disgust after finding out that its citizens have been eating horse meat, not beef, in their cheap ready meals – and, before I get smug about that as someone who doesn’t eat meat at all, they’ve now worked out that there’s been faecal matter in IKEA cakes…who knows what we’ve eaten or drank over the years? We mostly live in a state of ignorance. If we’re being honest, society as we know it would utterly collapse if our electricity was off for much longer than a week. Our comparatively comfortable lifestyles are then, really, ever hanging by a thread, and The Bay does a nice job of playing with this truism. It’s definitely worthy of a look, and proof positive that found footage films can definitely still work as effective stories when done properly.
The Bay will be released in the UK by Momentum Pictures on the 18th March, 2013.
Trailer warning: it reveals far more plot details than the review!