47 Meters Down (previously known as In the Deep) is a 2017 survival thriller film co-written and directed by Johannes Roberts, starring Mandy Moore, Claire Holt and Matthew Modine.
The film follows Lisa (Moore) and Kate (Holt), two sisters who get invited to cage dive while on holiday in Mexico. When the winch system holding the cage breaks and the cage plummets 47 meters down to the ocean floor with the two girls trapped inside, they must find a way to escape, with less than an hour of oxygen and great white sharks stalking nearby.
The film received a sequel, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, in 2019. Once again directed by Roberts and featuring a cast including Sophie Nélisse, Nia Long and John Corbett, this film centers around a group of teenage girls who scuba dive to a sunken Mayan city and get trapped in the water by a group of sharks.
47 Meters Down and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged provide examples of:
- Aborted Arc: A rare justified example, but the audience never gets any further explanation when Kate and Lisa think they hear the boat leaving. It added to the tension that not only were they trapped at the bottom but now potentially trapped out in the middle of the ocean as well if they by some miracle were able to even to get to the surface. (It is, however, implied that they left to get the backup winch, since neither Kate nor Lisa remembered seeing a second one on the boat.)
- Action Survivor: Lisa and Kate. Subverted for poor Kate.
- Almost Out of Oxygen: Happens to both Kate and Lisa at one point, but fortunately, they manage to get oxygen tanks thrown down to them.
- Artistic License – Biology: The characters repeatedly caution Lisa against ascending too quickly to avoid getting "the bends" (also called decompression sickness) because if she does, she will die. In reality, while serious, decompression sickness is fairly treatable and significantly less likely to kill someone than several hungry great white sharks.
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: The sharks.
- Bittersweet Ending:
- In the first film, it's heavy on the bitter. Lisa is rescued by the Coast Guard and survives, but she's seen two people killed by sharks in front of her, one of which was her sister Kate.
- In the sequel, Mia and Sasha manage to survive, but Mia's father and their friends are all dead.
- Character Development: Subverted. Lisa appears to have developed into someone incredibly determined and resourceful at the film's climax. In reality she is just fantasizing about being the hero.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Javier and Kate both get eaten by sharks.
- Cruel Twist Ending: Downplayed, as Lisa at least survives, but due to suffering from hallucinations, she (and the audience) had been under the impression she managed to rescue Kate and they both survived. As it turns out, Lisa hallucinated the whole thing and Kate is dead.
- Daydream Surprise: At one point, Lisa manages to get herself and her sister to the surface to be rescued, but this turns out to be a hallucination brought on by nitrogen narcosis.
- Dead All Along: Kate, after the two "make it to the surface".
- Downer Ending: Subverted. Just as Lisa and Kate get back to the surface, the film cuts back underwater, with Lisa rambling incoherently while Taylor tries to inform her she is hallucinating to no avail. The movie begins to pan out as if this is how the movie is going to end. And just before another film would have cut to black, the coast guard arrives and rescues Lisa, turning it into a Bittersweet Ending.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The girls fall 47 meters down to the sea floor.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The entire movie takes place over the course of about 24 hours and the last half takes place over the course of about 30 minutes.
- Extreme Omnivore: The sharks.
- Family-Unfriendly Violence: Despite their PG-13 ratings, both films feature some pretty brutal and bloody shark attacks. The sequel goes the extra mile with two sharks fighting over Nicole, who proceed to rip her in half onscreen and swim off with blood trails.
- Fear-Induced Idiocy:
- Having talked her friends into exploring the underwater ruins, Nicole ends up causing trouble by panicking at the sight of an angry cavefish and kicking wildly out of the way - a serious no-no in cave-diving. As a result, she ends up knocking over a stone column, throwing up a huge cloud of silt that leaves the friends disoriented and separated, allowing the cave sharks time to ambush them.
- Later, the divers have finally found the rope that can lead them out of the lagoon and onto the dry land atop the surrounding cliffs. Grant advises them to proceed slowly up the rope, and though cave sharks are gathering below, they're blind and can't sense their prey if they don't move too much. However, Nicole panics again and climbs over Alexa to get to the rope; in the process, she sends Alexa tumbling back into the water, accidentally tears the rope out of its mooring, costs the divers their best chance to escape, and ends up falling back into the lagoon anyway when she loses her grip on the cliff. Not only do the sharks tear her to pieces as a result of all the kicking and screaming, but as a result of her panic, she also gets Grant and Alexa killed as well.
- Final Girl: There's only two of them, but Kate dies, with only Lisa left to survive and fend for herself.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: As Lisa is swimming out over the abyss, notice that several small fish start quickly swimming at her right before the shark comes out of the nothing.
- Javier was already dead by the time Kate frees herself. During the climax when Kate is rescued, we see Javier as one of the rescuers. Though blurry and unfocused, it's clearly him, giving an indication that this is not reality.
- Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Kate and Lisa, respectively.
- Foreshadowing: You may notice something is off before the reveal that Lisa hallucinated the entire third act thanks to rapture of the deep. When she finds Kate, there's a massive ugly bite wound on her leg, but her face and upper body seem mostly unscathed, which is odd when you remember that the shark seized her around the head and shoulders when it dragged her off.
- From Bad to Worse: Starts with Kate and Lisa's shark cage plummeting to the ocean bottom and gets worse with repeated shark attacks, their air supplies running lower by the minute, Lisa getting her leg trapped beneath the cage, and the threat of nitrogen narcosis.
- Godzilla Threshold: The reason spare oxygen tanks weren't sent down to the girls in the first place was because changing tanks increases the threat of nitrogen narcosis. With them out of air Javier dead and the second cable broken, their escort has no choice but to do so. Getting them also forces the girls to leave the cage and expose themselves to the sharks. Kate gets killed retrieving them and Lisa suffers from a hallucination caused in part by the nitrogen narcosis, no doubt spurred on by changing her oxygen tank.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: In the sequel, the most violent onscreen death goes to Nicole when two sharks descend upon her and rip her in half.
- Hope Spot: Three: the first is Javier, the second is the cable Javier was carrying and the third is Lisa actually managing to get her leg free from the cage and save Kate and herself.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: In the sequel Grant, Mia's dad is given a rousing speech to the remaining girls only for a shark to leap out of the water, grab him and take him under.
- Magic Countdown: As the oxygen tanks start to run out, the girls constantly check their numbers to see how much they have left, but the amount of oxygen left doesn't correspond with the time in the movie.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Used several times to great effect but most effectively when Lisa is swimming over the abyss and doesn't even know if she's going in the right direction or if shark is going to attack.
- Off with His Head!: In the sequel, all Mia finds of Carl is his horribly disfigured severed head.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Claire Holt's Australian accent is noticeable several times throughout the movie, particularly at the beginning.
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Both girls bleed profusely at different points in the movie, but it never really seems to affect them. Justified, as it happens during a hallucination. In reality Lisa is the only one who bleeds and it's from two fairly minor wounds.
- Super-Persistent Predator: The sharks, even after one failed attack after another, never seem to give up on their quest to eat the protagonists. Possibly justified by the fact chum was dumped into the water for the expressed purpose of luring them in and when the cage fell Lisa hit her head and bleed into the water, likely further provoking them. Lisa also gets very close to the mutilated corpse of Javier before returning to the cage and was likely covered in fresh blood. Also, the sharks aren't genuinely seen again after Kate's death, so they may simply have given up at that point.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Sharks are ambush predators, as a result whenever one attacks there's next to no warning and the girls have a split second to react at most. Surprisingly Sudden Death is in full effect with neither Javier or Kate having any time to speak or react before being killed.
- The girls can't just break for the surface or they may get the bends and die anyway.
- Kate doesn't miraculously survive being grabbed by a shark at 47 meters below the surface.
- Mia is very much against going on an impromptu cave dive because A) they are potentially very dangerous and B) the 'experience' that Sasha cites her having was years ago and with her father. As a result, she makes numerous mistakes that are even outright cited in the film (in particular, Ben asks incredulously why they didn't have a guideline).
- Alexa is aware of the dangers of cave diving and emphasizes how they should not deviate from their plan, and that what she says should be followed as orders. She isn't even finished with her sentence when Nicole is already flaunting her directions. Nicole doing her own thing is what gets them into a crisis in the first place, and her attempt to jump the line and save her own skin is what gets her (along with Alexa and Grant) killed.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: Both Javier and Kate are grabbed out of nowhere by a shark. Justified, as sharks are ambush predators and thus that's exactly how they actually attack in real life.
- The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Downplayed and one-sided: Lisa reveals to Kate, early in the movie, that she felt in competition with her, being that Lisa is the responsible, levelheaded one who's never been a dude magnet and has recently been dumped for being 'boring' and Kate instead is the risk-taker, traveler with a bubbly personality and much more successful with the opposite gender, to Kate's surprise.
- Threatening Shark: Every single shark in the ocean is out to get Lisa and Kate, and as a matter of fact, every other human that comes down in the ocean. It's justified because they were in the middle of shark-feeding territory and Lisa received an injury which had her blood seeping out into ocean water, drawing the sharks' attention to them. The fact that no one were using the necessary tactics needed to avoid the sharks don't help matter either.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: Two girls are trapped in a cage with sharks all around them trying to eat them at every corner.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: The three Hope Spots end like this. Javier comes to help the sisters...and is killed by a shark. The girls are able to use a second cable to start winching themselves up...only for that one to break too and send them right back to square one. The worst is when Lisa manages to save Kate after she's attacked by a shark and they both make it back to the surface...only for it to turn out that Lisa was hallucinating due to nitrogen narcosis and never actually found Kate.
