Director Barry Levinson deploys found footage to startling new effect, conveying terror of an ecological phenomenon that might easily be real
Are you fed up with found footage? Think it's time the stratagem was moved up to the next level? You may even see the whole thing as a pointless gimmick. Prepare to be knocked out. The Bay bursts through the home-video barrier to present not the record from a single camcorder but a comprehensive montage of the different kinds of audiovisual data, public and private, that were generated by the events it portrays. In so doing, it offers a fresh and arresting insight into the way we're now documenting our history.
That's point one. Point two is that the terror evoked this time doesn't depend on fantasy fears about ghosts, aliens, cannibals or zombies. It's prompted by phenomena that could actually occur, or almost have done, and should therefore scare the rationally oriented even more than timorous types. This is horror for grown-ups.
Donna (played note-perfectly by Kether Donohue) is a novice journalist putting together a video exposé of a scandal that has been suppressed by the authorities. Three years earlier, she was a callow intern covering Fourth of July celebrations in a small Maryland seaside resort for local TV. The sun shone, children paddled and contestants in a crab-eating competition cheerily threw up.
Then some of the frolickers came out in rashes. These turned into blisters, boils and appalling lesions, resulting in horrible agony and a disgusting death. The condition spread and hospitals were overwhelmed; the disease control centre was baffled. It turned out that the culprit was a primitive fish parasite that had developed a taste for humans.
Hundreds of tonnes of steroid-rich excrement dumped into the sea from a local chicken farm had caused the mutation. Warnings of potential risks had been ignored and, even as the body count mounted, officialdom was denying the danger. Eventually, the town was quarantined, the critters were exterminated, the surviving townspeople were bribed to keep their mouths shut and the whole incident was hushed up.
Now Donna is blowing the gaff by aggregating her tapes from the day with an imposing array of CCTV and webcam footage, emergency service vehicle recordings, Skype conference calls between panicking officials, TV news output, video from deceased holidaymakers' cameraphones, and much else. It's not clear how she got hold of this stuff; the Pulitzer judges will clearly be pretty impressed. Nonetheless, it all makes for a compulsively gripping tale.
Jaws may come to mind, but this time the found footage really does create the feeling of authenticity for which its originator must have hoped and of which Steven Spielberg could only dream. You can smell both the salt in the sea air and the different varieties of fear that course through the veins of victims, relatives, doctors, policemen and officials. In comparison, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which may come to mind, seems absurdly stilted and stagey.
The Bay's persuasiveness is down not just to its narrative method but to acute observation and precise writing. There's at least one top 10 scary moment, when the mini-beast (literally) jumps the species gap from fish to human. Still, the film is no mere genre curiosity. You don't have to be into horror to find it disturbing. The story isn't that far-fetched: in Chesapeake Bay, where the film is set, a 100-mile stretch of the main channel already becomes a dead zone every summer.
All the same, The Bay played at Toronto only in the Midnight Madness strand. Here at San Sebastián, it isn't in competition for the Golden Shell, though it could knock spots off some of the candidates. Yet the film's merits should hardly come as that much of a surprise, in view of its provenance.
The Bay wasn't made by a horror hack. It was directed by no less a figure than Barry Levinson, who has behind him Rain Man, Sleepers, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Diner. Levinson has always been acutely interested in the minutiae of human behaviour, and it's this concern that makes The Bay the triumph that it is.
Brilliant films that are not easily pigeon-holed often have to struggle for recognition. So far, The Bay has secured a release in America and the Netherlands. Let's hope this proves to be a contagion that spreads.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/26/the-bay-review
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