Reviews
‘Chum’ Review – Get Your A.I. Trash Machine Out of Our Animal Attack Films!
It’s a rare but understood truth that the peak entry in the shark attack subgenre came at the very beginning with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster, Jaws. That’s not the way it usually works, but while Spielberg’s film was immediately chased by copycats and knockoffs – some of which are a lot of fun – it’s continued to hold the title of best killer shark movie for over half a century.
Until now.
Ha, sorry, that was cruel, but sometimes you have to make your own entertainment when the movie you’re watching and writing about offers none of its own. Chum is the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel shark flick that we’ve seen a lot of in recent years, with interchangeable titles like Great White, Shark Bait, and Maneater. A sunny setting (usually the best thing about the movie), obnoxious characters, poor writing, and horrible effects – that’s the recipe for far too many shark attack movies over the past decade, and Chum ticks off each of those boxes in quick order.
It stands apart from those other bad films, though, with the addition of two simple letters. One is an A, and the other is an I, and together they spell shitty, job-killing digital effects. More on that in a minute, but for now, let’s dive into the guts of Chum.
We open on a fishing trawler moving through the water off Malta while a man provides voiceover. Roy (Jim Klock) talks solemnly about the endless ocean, his lovely wife, and the painful collision between the two that came when a Great White shark bit her in half. “I am not the sea,” he says, “I’m a man, and a man does not forget.”
A quick smash to the title card is followed by the introduction of Tina (Alice Eve) and Tom (Eric Michael Cole) at their wedding reception in Malta. There’s already trouble in paradise, but a last minute wedding gift sees them heading out to sea for a three-hour tour the next afternoon with three friends and Tina’s sister, Sadie (Elle Haymond). A couple of very contrived beats later, and the yacht is sinking and in flames, forcing them to be rescued by a conveniently nearby Roy.
He’s not their savior, though, and instead drugs and binds the gang with the intention of using them for a very particular purpose. It’s vengeance he’s after, and he intends to use them as bait in an effort to attract and then kill the shark that ate half of his wife five years ago. Roy apparently got a tracker on the beast at some point, and over the years, he’s tried luring it in with fish entrails, seals, cats, and dogs – but it only responds to live human chum. Uh oh!
A shark attack movie doesn’t need to be entirely original in its concept or execution for it to work, so I’m not put off that the filmmakers obviously watched Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals before concocting the story for Chum. The human antagonist is the only thing they lifted, though, as they apparently decided they just didn’t need any of that film’s fun, suspense, or onscreen/offscreen talent. Director/co-writer Jonathan Zuck and co-writer Joe Leone – this is Leone’s thirteenth produced script since 2017, a feat that grows less impressive if you actually watch those other movies – try to pair character drama with the twin terrors of a madman and a hungry shark, but everything here just falls flat.
What could have been an engaging piece of sunlit terror instead stumbles and falls beneath clunky dialogue and even worse delivery. The cast, Eve surprisingly included, are as unconvincing at saying “good morning” as they are at exclaiming “Jesus! Are you okay?” after pulling a spear from their friend and watching the blood gush out. Did I laugh when someone tells Roy, “You know, for a shark hunter, you’re not very good at this,” or when someone else refers to the aquatic threat as “some aggro incel shark”? Yes, but that says more about my desperate need for entertainment than it does the quality of the movie.
There’s a genuine litany of dumb things worth criticizing, questioning, and calling out with Chum – one friend confronts Roy because they haven’t seen the shore for hours, but not only has the shore been visible throughout the film, it’s literally in the background of the scene when he says it. Slow motion and repeated, unnecessary flashbacks are frequently used to bolster the eighty-three-minute (pre-credits) running time. The red color tinting whenever there’s blood in the water is horrendous. We’re in Malta, but everyone, including the police, is American? A certain character is given an insulting, post-death voiceover. Climate change is lazily tacked on as a motivation for the shark’s behavior.
There’s also an argument to be made that the film’s serious tone is part of the problem. The issue isn’t that neither the writing nor the performances can deliver on that seriousness, which they can’t, but instead, deadly serious shark attack movies just rarely seem to work. There are examples of great ones like Open Water and The Reef, but in recent years, the overwhelming majority of the shark movies that deliver the goods all seem to have a sense of humor and a genuine personality. They’re not comedies, but from The Shallows and Deep Blue Sea 3 (shut up, it’s a really good time) to Under Paris and Thrash, the shark films that are having fun are the shark films that are fun.
But yes, better scripts, direction, performances, and visual effects would also help.
Which brings us, finally, to the ugly ass elephant in the room – Chum’s use of A.I. to create what looks like all of its shark carnage. The modern ideal will almost always be some combination of practical effects and traditionally created digital effects to breathe life into your film’s sharks, and even then, the end results can still be a mixed bag. Most recent films tend to rely almost exclusively on the digital, with plenty of the sharks looking laughable as a result, but there’s still at least the solace of knowing that hey, real digital FX animators were paid real money to create those ugly visuals, so kudos to them on their journey towards becoming better.
Chum doesn’t list a single digital effects artist in their end credits. Not one. There are a few supervisors and producers, but not a single VFX artist, compositor, or animator.
The charitable explanation is that the filmmakers just decided not to credit the individual artists for some reason. There’s no listing for the end credits song (called “Crimson Tide,” maybe?) either, so it’s entirely possible. The more likely explanation, though, is found in the film’s only credited digital intermediate house, Tunnel Post, which states on their site that their “Artificial Intelligence division augments all of Tunnel’s business disciplines.” A.I. has its place, obviously, and Tunnel’s use of it in other areas might be understandable, but replacing human artists with a garbage machine is just poor form.
Some of you might not care about that aspect, and I can hear you insensitive jerks now yelling, “Get off your soapbox, Hunter, and just tell us how the effects look!” Fair enough. The shark attack sequences in Chum look pretty darn good if you watch from fifty feet away while squinting through a fog bank and some partially closed Venetian blinds.
The A.I. sequences blend real shark and human footage with digital sharks and people to make it look like characters are not just beside the shark in the water, but actually being chomped and eaten. The quickest of glances might seem convincing, partly because we’re just not used to seeing “real” sharks biting down on “real” people, but watch for more than a half second or so, and it’s clearly a cartoon.
The shark looks too smooth, the people sometimes fluctuate weirdly – one character jumps onto the back of the shark and seems to temporarily grow three pant sizes while in the air – and it just never feels like a tangible situation or threat. Try chumming some of this shit, indeed.
Look, if you’re anything like me – well, first off, congratulations – but more relevant to the point at hand, you’re going to watch this movie regardless of what I say. I get it. Animal attack films are an addiction that I am unable and unwilling to quit. (I’m the same way with Bigfoot movies, and hoo boy, let me tell you, the decline rate on those is even steeper.) There are fun, effective shark films with shoddy effects, movies that entertain despite their visuals, but Chum is not one of them.
No thrills, no suspense, no entertainment value, no real effort, no digital effects artists, and no reason to watch. But you will, so I hope you enjoy it more than I do.
Chum releases in theaters on June 5, 2026.
Anyone who’s ever been a full-time caregiver, either professionally or voluntarily, knows that a strange intimacy emerges in even the coldest, most emotionally detached circumstances. There’s an agreed-upon mutual vulnerability, an acceptance that you’re going to know each other not just intimately but in a mundane way, and it breeds some strange reactions.
Night Nurse, the feature debut from writer/director Georgia Bernstein (best known as a producer on things like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms), thrives in this strangeness, and it’s at its best when it embraces it wholly and without judgement. Despite some narrative stumbles, particularly in the third act, this is an emotionally precise, compelling psychological thriller with layers to spare.
Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) has just taken a job as a nurse at a luxury retirement community, the kind where each patient has a private villa and receives 24-hour care from a pair of nurses, one for daytime and one for night. As the newbie of the group, Eleni gets night nurse duty and ends up paired with Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a charming, strangely alluring man battling dementia. With input from Douglas’s day shift nurse, Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Eleni quickly becomes fascinated by the man, who might be a high-functioning old guy with memory issues or might just be a master con artist.
Soon, the latter impression takes hold, as Douglas ropes Eleni into his ongoing game of phone scamming other members of the community for cash. The danger of these scams, and the risk Eleni feels when she gets on the phone to pretend to be a distressed granddaughter in need of money, is intoxicating, but the longer the game goes on, the more she has to wonder: Who’s taking care of who, and what happens when the relationship starts to fray?
Bernstein approaches this narrative with an intense intimacy, a closeness to the characters and their contained little world of Douglas’s villa that hums with menace and uncertainty. From an opening credits sequence that feels worthy of Brian De Palma to a breathtaking moment when Eleni first discovers what Douglas is really up to, Bernstein leaves us no distance from these characters, and that’s by design. The closeness, helped along by inventive and painterly cinematography from Lidia Nikonova, builds a universe within Douglas’s villa, and probes Eleni’s persistent loneliness while she gets closer and closer to her charge and his schemes.
While it does function as a psychological thriller, with all the requisite darkness, tension, and destructive behavior, Night Nurse works best when it’s patient, something Bernstein and editor Alex Jacobs underscore at every opportunity. The film refuses to spoon feed its audience the details of each character’s motives and judgement, leaving us instead with the often impulsive, often intuitive decisions of Eleni, Douglas, and Mona as they move through this strange space they’ve created for themselves.
It’s a filmmaking method that leans heavily on the performances to communicate emotional subtleties, and while Bernstein’s craft is on-point, it’s the work of Paksoy and McKenzie that makes the movie. Together they’re a duo we can’t look away from, their interactions sometimes erotically charged, sometimes tender in a way that recalls a father-daughter bond, but always laced with something darker. Paksoy can make entire scenes of silence into compelling drama, and McKenzie is a relentless bomb of charm and danger.
As all of these elements swirl together, Night Nurse becomes a meditation on the strangeness of the bond between a caregiver and a patient, and how far each will go to hold up the other. Eleni enters Douglas’s world and finds a home there not because she’s innately suited to criminal enterprise, but because she finds something thrilling and genuinely satisfying in meeting the old man’s needs, even if they are sometimes nefarious. Douglas, for his part, takes satisfaction in manipulating those around him, but he also relishes the tenderness that comes from Eleni and Mona’s devotion. These elements dance around each other so delicately that it genuinely feels like just about anything could happen next, and for most of its runtime Night Nurse milks that feeling for all it’s worth.
The only place it falters, unfortunately, is in the final act, when characters move into place for a conclusion that feels only partially earned. One of the dangers of building a film so firmly on top of intuition, intimacy, and patience is what happens when you let all of that fall away in service of plotting, and Night Nurse never quite makes that transition. Rough-edged though it is, though, the ending can’t take away from the solid filmmaking foundation that built this movie, and by the third act that foundation is so firm that the film still mostly holds together.
There are stumbles in Night Nurse, as there are in basically any directorial debut, but those do little to diminish the promise at work in this movie. Georgia Bernstein is a star in the making on the indie scene, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Night Nurse is in theaters July 10.
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