Director Andrew Traucki’s sequel to his own 2010 feature The Reef features a whole new cast of Australian characters battling a hefty shark near the Great Barrier Reef, but it’s essentially the same idea. Only this time round, the nearly entirely female cast features two sisters and two of their friends on a kayaking excursion that goes wrong but not through any fault of their own. Indeed, in a break with the traditional blame-the-humans strategy of these sort of when-animals-attack stories, the landlubbers aren’t being punished by the universe for hubris, or a failure to heed the warnings or some such.
That said, the past does shape the story: main protagonist Nic (Teressa Liane) was traumatised nine months earlier when her other sister was murdered by an abusive partner, drowned in her own bathtub. Nic found her body and ever since she’s been (perhaps a bit irrationally) afraid of water and keeps having super-swiftly-edited flashbacks where she imagines she is being drowned herself.
