It's on Netflix and it's the craziest movie you'll see about the Seine River: worse even than stopping some Olympic Games

France wanted the river Seine to be one of the main protagonists of Paris 2024 and that is indeed happening, although not in the way they would have liked. The Olympic Games organization has decided on Tuesday to postpone the men's triathlon event, originally scheduled for Tuesday, July 30, due to the poor quality of the highly contaminated river water and levels unsuitable for swimming.

After confirming that the rains on Friday and Saturday have deteriorated the water quality of the Seine and the analyses show "values above acceptable limits" at certain points in the riverbed, this event has been postponed until tomorrow, although there is no guarantee that it can finally take place at this location.

This negative connotation of the emblematic river of the French capital has brought back to relevance the movie Under Paris, a Netflix production with a documentary title, which has become one of the surprises of the summer since its premiere last June, already being considered by many as the best shark genre film since Steven Spielberg's classic from the 80s.

The driving force behind this story is Lilith, the name for a dangerous shark that a group of scientists lost track of five years before the story begins, when it devoured almost all the members of a research team one by one.

Sophia, the only survivor of the group, decided to abandon the study of shark mutations related to climate change that she was conducting at that time, until five years later, Mika, an environmental activist, discovered a huge shark lurking in the Seine a few days before the start of the Triathlon World Championships in Paris.

The shark turns out to be the same one they were tracking back then, so to prevent an imminent bloodbath, Sophia, Mika, and Adil, a reluctant officer from the Seine river police, must work together before it's too late.

The big revelation of this summer

A year ago, the revelation in the horror genre was the Japanese production Godzilla Minus One (also released on Netflix), which with a fraction of the budget of Hollywood's major productions was well received by critics; an audience that welcomed it with open arms for being a proposal with a playful spirit that didn't require the prior homework demanded by Marvel and DC; and also by the Academy, which awarded it an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

With a similar proposal of pure entertainment, Deep in the Seine (Under Paris), directed and co-written by Xavier Gens (Lupin, Gangs of London, Hit Man), is an action, terror, and disaster movie with a simple yet effective plot about a mutant shark in the Seine River ready to devour the world's best athletes.

Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) plays Sophia, a marine biologist, in the leading role, accompanied in the cast by Léa Léviant (I Am Not an Easy Man) as Mika, an ocean conservationist from the SOS organization; Nassim Lyes (Mayhem!) as Adil, a police commander; Nagisa Morimoto (Moon Knight) as Ben, Mika's colleague at SOS, and Aurélia Petit (Personal Shopper) as Angèle, Adil's boss.

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence