Under Paris: Sharks Adapting to Ecological Damage

In a recent Horror Homeroom Conversations podcast, we were discussing two ecohorror films – The Great Alligator (Sergio Martino, 1979) and Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980) – and came to two conclusions. First, that Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) casts an enormous shadow over the natural horror films that followed. And, second, that there is a formulaic plot structuring such films, one so incredibly common as to seem fixed, inevitable. As we described this plot in the podcast: 1) humans tamper with the natural environment; 2) as a result, a creature launches a rampaging attack on said humans; and 3) the besieged humans fight back – almost always winning. Given our discussion in this podcast, and my recent immersion in natural horror films, I was very excited when Xavier Gens’ new genre film, Under Paris (Sous la Seine) arrived on Netflix. And I was right to be excited: Under Paris is a great natural horror film and now resides among my top 5 shark horror films (I’ll give the whole top 5 at the end!)

What has most changed about ecohorror films in the first decades of the twenty-first century – as Under Paris demonstrates – concerns the ebb and flow of the first trait in particular (humans tamper with the natural environment). Some films barely mention the disastrous ecological consequences of humans’ actions. Indeed, Jaws doesn’t at all. The shark attacks in Jaws are unmotivated and uncaused and thus vaguely attributed (quite problematically and erroneously) to ‘natural’ shark behavior. Other films position humans as the prime cause. In Alligator, for instance, the giant creature inhabiting the sewers of the unspecified midwestern city is only there because of the callousness of humans toward animal life; moreover, it’s only as large (and hungry) as it is because of human experimentation with growth hormones and the appalling treatment of animal test subjects.

In the twenty-first century, the ebb and flow of this first trait (humans tamper with the natural environment) has definitively shifted toward amplifying both human tampering and its consequences. Natural horror films have shown an increasing propensity to incorporate climate change, global warming, or some form of ecological damage into their plots. It should be noted, though, that these narratives are certainly not new, hearkening back to 1950s sci-fi-horror films about the Bomb. Indeed, in his recent book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, Adam Kirsch notes that “the climate anxiety of the 2010s can be seen as a return of apocalyptic fears [about nuclear war] that went briefly into abeyance after the end of the Cold War.”[i] Despite this recent focus on the dire effects of human behavior, however, it is important to note that – generally – the humans keep winning in these narratives, destroying the creatures they’ve awoken and demonstrating the power of humans’ need to dominate the environment, even when they’ve just witnessed how destructive that is.

To return to Under Paris, though: Gens’ film does a lot of interesting things with shark horror and with the broader natural /eco horror film. Like every shark horror film since 1975, it references Jaws (quite self-consciously) – but it is in every way ‘bigger’ – more – than Jaws, and that ‘bigness,’ as well as its narrative twists and turns make Under Paris not only one of the best shark horror films but also one of the more interesting recent cinematic commentaries on climate change.

The film begins in the Pacific Ocean, at one of the epicenters of ecological damage, where an island – dubbed the “seventh continent” – of discarded plastic floats. Marine researcher Sophia Assalas (Bérénice Bejo) and her team are tracking a tagged mako shark, whom they have called Lilith (that name is significant) when at least three unusual things happen: they see makos swimming in a pack; they discover a Lilith who is vastly larger than she should be; and when one of the team tries to draw a blood sample, she attacks him and then the sharks turn on and kill all the divers.

Cut to three years later, as a grieving Sophia is working in Paris. Bodies turn up that appear to have been attacked by sharks. Cue one of the Jaws references: someone responds to Sophia’s declaration that the wounds on a victim’s body were made by a shark by insisting that they could have been made by a boat propeller. It doesn’t take Sophia long to realize that Lilith has come to Paris (more unusual behavior), and as Sophia gets drawn into the investigation of the shark attacks in the Seine, she becomes involved with a police diver Adil (Nassim Lyes) and a group of radical climate activists led by Mika (Léa Léviant) and her girlfriend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto). At the same time, Paris is preparing to host a triathlon (a showcase for the upcoming Olympics) – and Sophia and her allies have to contend not only with marauding sharks but also with a mayor who is bent on holding the triathlon despite the increasingly unambiguous evidence of the presence of ferocious sharks. Cue more references to Jaws.

Gens has said in an interview that Under Paris is a satirical film in the vein of Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021). And, indeed, the film has many darkly comedic moments, notably centering on the mayor and her denials of what is happening right before her eyes. In a scene that dramatically ups the ante on Jaws, Sophia tells the mayor that “hundreds” will die if she goes ahead with the triathlon, but the mayor just insists, “Sharks are harmless to humans. All species are welcome.” Mass carnage ensues. In these scenes in particular, Under Paris turns what is the relatively mild venal blindness demonstrated by the mayor in Jaws (based in local, economic interest) into a commentary on the much more widespread and devastating contemporary blindness to the catastrophic changes in the environment and the ecology of the planet. These catastrophic changes, and this dangerous blindness, come home to roost in the heart of Paris.

The most interesting thing Under Paris does is to depict the ferocious behavior of Lilith as an adaptation – not as a direct cause of specific human actions. In Alligator, for instance, bad corporate types dump growth hormones in the sewers, and an alligator, also dumped down there, grows large and hungry as a result of ingesting those hormones. In Under Paris, causality is more indirect, more unintentional, and thus a more powerful representation of how humans are actually harming the Earth and its species.

To set up this idea of indirect causality, the film opens with a quotation “based on Charles Darwin”: “The species that survive aren’t the strongest species, nor are they the most intelligent, but rather the ones who best adapt to change.” Lilith and her fellow mako sharks have adapted to change – have adapted, the film suggests, to a damaged planet. That the film begins at the island of plastics floating in the Pacific suggests that the plastics flooding the oceans may be one condition to which the makos have adapted.

The sharks’ adaptations are dizzyingly many and are, of course, compressed into an impossibly shortened time scale. They have, first and foremost, adapted to freshwater – hence their living in the Seine and in the catacombs under Paris where they are breeding “like larvae in a hive.” Sophia and her allies also discover sharks who are pregnant without having achieved sexual maturity: “that’s not normal,” one of the scientists says. Most strikingly, they discover that the sharks are breeding through parthenogenesis. This last discovery leads Sophia to claim that the makos have adapted to such an extent that they are not recognizably mako sharks anymore; they have become “a new species.” (Hence the significance of the name Lilith – the Biblical Adam’s first wife and thus the potential origin of an alternative human mythology to that of Adam and Eve.) In their evolution into a new species, the makos come to represent a kind of future for Earth and for humanity – some unthinkable, unknowable end result of what we’ve been doing (both intentionally and unintentionally) to the planet. They are the embodiment of the often-unpredictable consequences that constitute the effects of longstanding anthropogenic climate change. Not surprisingly, given the horror that this realization induces, the response even of Sophia and the other scientists is that the sharks need to be “eliminated.”

The combined human efforts at “elimination” are disastrous, not least because those efforts – to blow up the hordes of makos – trigger unexploded ordnance lying in the Seine. Under Paris thus cleverly marks how war (especially World War 2) has been one of the persistent human activities that has wreaked devastation on the planet.[ii] With its accumulating human sins – all of which have indirectly created the shark-apocalypse that Under Paris brilliantly visualizes – it’s not surprising that this film, at least, does not show humanity triumphant over the ‘creature’ it has awakened.

Here are my top 5 shark horror films:

-5. Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 19999)

-4. The Reef (Andrew Traucki, 2010)

-3. Under Paris (Xavier Gens, 2024)

-2. Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003)

-1. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Honorary Mention: Jaws 3-D (Joe Alves, 1983; I thought Jaws 2 was good but derivative, while Jaws 3-D struck out on its own), Bait (Kimble Rendell, 2012), Sharknado (Anthony C. Ferrante, 2013), The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Sera, 2016), 47 Meters Down (Johannes Roberts, 2017), and The Black Demon (Adrian Grünberg, 2023).

I have previously written about two quite different types of shark horror: Shark Horror: Naturalistic Horror and Shark Horror: The Shark in the Human World. Part of what is interesting about Under Paris is that it straddles both categories.

Related: About one of Gwen’s favorite shark horror films: Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre Gets It Sooo Right.  Talking Shark Night and The Shallows.

 

Notes

[i] Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us (Columbia Global Reports, 2023), p. 18.

[ii] See, for instance, The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, edited by Timo Vuorisalo, Simo Laakkonen, and Richard P. Tucker (Oregon State University Press, 2017).