What Lurks Beneath

When I sat down to watch the 2024 horror movie "What Lurks Beneath" here in 2025, I had never even heard about the movie. But the movie's cover was interesting enough to make me stop up and pick up the movie. Sure, I virtually didn't know what I was in for here, aside from whatever little information was shared by the movie's synopsis. So I suppose that writer Marcus Raul and director Jamie Bailey had every opportunity to entertain me.

The narrative in the movie is sluggishly paced, and that makes sitting through "What Lurks Beneath" somewhat of a struggle. There wasn't really a whole lot of exciting things taking place throughout the slow paced narrative. Writer Marcus Raul didn't really pull of an overly great script here for director Jamie Bailey to bring to the movie.

The only familiar faces on the cast list, for me at least, were Simon Phillips, Anne-Carolyne Binette and Nick Biskupek. The acting performances in the movie were fair.

Visually then the movie was okay. It was not a movie that boasted a whole lot of special effects, but whatever effects were in the movie were fair enough.

The sets in the movie were good, though. It certainly does look and feel like a narrow and crammed submarine.

Watchable, if you don't sit down with too high expectations, but hardly a movie that I would recommend you to rush out and get to watch. Nor is it a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time.

My rating of director Jamie Bailey's 2024 movie "What Lurks Beneath" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

Acting is almost daytime soap opera quality. For this to be a naval sub, it seems very small, and the crew limited. The movie is obviously filmed on a tiny budget. I am not a sailor or in the military, but the captain gives direct orders and they are not followed through. The captain never questions his crew, nor does he follow up on the orders he gave his crew. I have to blame the writing and direction on why this was so poor. There is a serious lack of motives, from the crew and the creature.

The creature. Isn't scary, sexy, but is more of a poor subplot or a MacGuffin device to keep you watching. The special effects are also budgeted, but I have never graded a movie on eye candy. There is so little blood or violence. I would say it would be rated PG-13 or TV14 at best. Removing the creature from this story and what you have is badly written version of Crimson Tide or some other nuclear submarine psychological thriller.

In the end, this movie isn't good enough to watch for content. It isn't campy and thus not a good cheesy movie. It just exists and I hope that director Jamie Bailey and writer Marcus Raul find new career paths.

The movie ended up being frustrating because the potential was there. The acting was serviceable to decent, especially given the script they had to work with. They tried to blend a war film with horror elements, and really squandered the horror potential. They did not use the claustrophobic setting effectively at all, and didn't focus on the "woman" and her abilities nearly enough. The writers didn't seem to know of a way to keep the woman in the sub without making the characters, who otherwise seemed competent, repeatedly notice and then immediately begin to ignore all of the strange happenings that began immediately after finding her in the torpedo tube, which should have been the first clue that she had to be dealt with. A better written and directed version of this movie could have been described as a cross between Alien and Dr. Strangelove, but this ultimately just ended up being another waste of potential, which is a shame for the fairly unknown cast. 5 stars because the concept had enough potential to get me to the end of the film without really wanting to turn it off.

Relative novice director Jamie Baily and first time writer Marcus Raul have attempted a serious and poignant horror thriller that becomes one of the most torturous movies to rate because it has an apparent number of inscrutable rational flaws of logic and military behavior involving a nuclear submarine, its members, a well performed female stranger, and possible World War III (reminiscent of the television series Outer Limits, 1995-2002) devastation along with an extremely difficult job of including a number of subplots that get awkwardly entangled into the movie. From the beginning, writer Rual has a difficult time incorporating important plot points that seem to control the script in ways are arbitrarily inserted in places that don't feel natural. The attempt to tie the climax with a fragile relational dilemma, behind the scenes secrets between the American Naval members and the British Intel operators seem unnecessarily uneven. Nevertheless the sincerity of the attempt at a pure consistent narrative structure throughout the movie along with the dramatic and emotional ending holds itself up well. This movie is worth one viewing for its depth of substance incorporating a series of neat Naval command protocols usually overlooked in average military movies, the number of authentic feeling human doubts, and the strength of the main plot that make this movie barely survive its higher rating.

The sub in this film or whatever was used looks really old, probably last used in the 1990s. There's white paneling with wood trim. The controls look 1970s era and there are some 1990s era small televisions.

So they could have set this film in an earlier era. Some other things still aren't quite right though. The captain looks like he's only 30 and has sleeve tattoos. One of the crewmembers is severely overweight, like what the heck is he doing on the sub?

Outside of that, the film is an interesting storyline but could have been presented better. The central character, the mysterious woman, is just not that interesting to watch.