Despite its potentially sensational subject matter, the HBO documentary After the Bite is not an official part of Shark Week. It’s a thoughtful and multifaceted documentary covering the proliferation of sharks off the Massachusetts coast, and the specific aftermath of a tragic 2018 shark-bite death that shocked and rattled a Cape Cod beach town.
Director Ivy Meeropol is aware that her movie has been positioned as (quite literally) Shark Week adjacent. “It’s kind of like a bait and switch,” she admitted. “I’m drawing people in who just are interested in sharks … and maybe they’ll get swept up in the story and find themselves thinking, wow, there’s something a lot scarier than sharks.” Even as broader issues like us-versus-them resistance to science and climate crisis loom in the background, the movie doesn’t indulge in scaremongering. Instead, it performs a delicate balancing act, acknowledging that there have been more sharks closer to Cape Cod shores in recent years while not giving in to the kind of panic that has informed public perception of sharks since Jaws became an all-time smash hit.
It’s tricky business, talking about real-life shark dangers after years of exaggeration and stigmatization so great that Peter Benchley, author of the original Jaws novel, was moved to become an active ocean conservationist. How do you address increased danger without demonizing animals that are just acting on instinct?
Meeropol has had plenty of practice addressing complex issues. Her previous documentaries are steeped in the complications of politics and social issues, often with a personal angle: Heir to an Execution explored her connection to her grandparents, the convicted and executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, while Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn investigated the notorious prosecutor in the Rosenbergs’ trial. The subject of sharks might seem far less complicated to some viewers, given their presence at the center of countless straightforward nature docs. But Meeropol is more interested in the broader environment the sharks unwittingly enter into. “I’m not a nature documentarian and I don’t want to try to present myself as an expert in the ocean,” she noted. “I became really interested in the way the community was reacting. This is like a real-life Jaws.”
She’s aware of the way fictional shark narratives loom over real-life considerations of animals, including a shot of Cape Cod folks watching Jaws at a drive-in and adding some visual nods to that Spielberg classic throughout her film. “I saw Jaws at too young an age, like a lot of people, where I’d be scared to swim in a pond when I was a kid, because there might be something under there.” After the Bite winds up reflecting both Meeropol’s expectations and her experiences: “I thought I was going to be scared, but I was absolutely in awe,” she said of her shark-spotting during filming. In one late-movie sequence following scientists locating the corpse of a humpback whale floating in the ocean, there’s a gorgeous sustained shot where a shark appears to materialize before our eyes as it slowly becomes more visible to the camera that’s been trained on it. (At first, Meeropol said, the crew thought it must be two sharks; it turned out to be a single 17-footer.) In a movie like The Shallows or Open Water, it would be a moment of pure terror; After the Bite recognizes the natural beauty of this creature.
Naturally, not everyone in the movie reacts with the same awe. After the Bite surveys various reactions to the shark presence: the practicalities of lifeguards updating their methods to warn swimmers when necessary; the efforts of scientists to track and understand shark behavior without upsetting their ecosystem; and the locals who repeatedly express their concerns that conservationists will neglect humans’ place in that ecosystem. Though the doc itself doesn’t underline the point, Meeropol sees echoes of the Trump era in these seemingly reasonable questions raised by those who blame an excess seal population for the shark uptick: “They’re upset about scientists who focus on sharks and seal conservation, and there’s this painful cry of ‘What about us? Don’t we matter?’ There are a lot of people out there who feel that way – who don’t trust scientists, who are upset that their way of life is being threatened and we have to grapple with that.”
It’s hard not to think of climate crisis, in the face of both the humans’ defensiveness and, frankly, any major environmental shift. On this topic, too, Meeropol and her film are careful and exacting. “When I started making the film,” she said, “I assumed there would be a very strong climate change link to why the sharks are there. And I find it fascinating that the shark scientists will not say that, because they don’t know enough. Because scientists are very careful, despite what people think about them!”
After the Bite doesn’t much resemble the type of thriller that has made sharks the rare animal to get their own subgenre of movies (only dogs seem to have more big-name films to their name), but it does share one thing in common with more sensational encounters between humans and sharks: it focuses intently on how the humans react. That’s ultimately what the documentary’s various points of view come together to illustrate: different ways we as a people might deal with the kinds of environmental changes that we’ll be facing for years to come. Unlike a traditional shark thriller, attempting to vanquish the enemy (whether it’s designated as seals, sharks or scientists) doesn’t seem tenable. “We’re trying,” Meeropol said, “to get to a point where we can coexist.”
After the Bite premieres on HBO on 26 July and in the UK at a later date
