Open Water Plot

Daniel Kintner (Daniel Travis) and Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) are an unmarried couple frustrated that their hard-working lives don't allow them to spend much time together. They decide to pack up and head out on a tropical vacation to help relieve their everyday stress and improve their relationship.

On their second day, Daniel and Susan set out on a group scuba dive. Some on board their boat express nervousness about sharks, but the dive instructor dismisses the danger with a joke. There is a head count, and the passenger total is recorded as 20.

Daniel and Susan hop in the water along with the rest of the divers. One man, Seth, has forgotten his mask and stays on board. Daniel and Susan decide to separate from the group while underwater. A woman who's having problems with pressure equalisation returns early with her partner. There are already three people back on the boat. This is recorded as 'three' back on board. After this tally, the woman who just surfaced offers her mask to Seth and he decides to dive with the woman's dive partner. The tally is not changed, because the man taking the tally did not see this happen. Half an hour later, the rest of the group returns to the boat. Going by the two earlier tallies, the total on board comes to twenty, though in reality it is eighteen. The boat leaves, and no one notices that Daniel and Susan are not aboard.

Soon after the boat leaves, Daniel and Susan return to the surface and look for the boat. They believe the boat will return for them, assuming someone on board would notice their belongings.
Stranded at sea, Daniel and Susan rehash old disputes, bicker about the wisdom of swimming for boats seen in the distance, battle bouts of hunger and mental exhaustion, and notice sharks circling them from below the surface. Susan is afraid of the sharks; Daniel tries to calm her, saying that "sharks are attracted to wounded fish," so they should try their best to stay calm and not splash around. Soon they are wounded by jellyfish, while several times sharks appear to try to figure out what they are. Susan is bitten by a shark, but doesn't realize it. Daniel notices this as he goes under to check out the 'nipping' feeling she has. He sees that it's small fish feeding on her bite wounds, but doesn't tell her that it's a shark bite.

Later, a shark bites Daniel, and the wound begins to bleed profusely. Susan removes her diving belt, and uses it to apply pressure to Daniel's wound. He appears to begin to go into shock. Susan herself is afraid, telling him to "just keep breathing," which confuses him. The diving suits seem to keep them from realizing they're being bitten. That night, during a strong storm, the shark returns and again attacks Daniel, killing him.

The next morning, the pair's belongings are finally found on the boat, and a search begins. Meanwhile, Susan, having held on to Daniel through the night, finally realizes he is dead and releases him into the water, where sharks attack in a feeding frenzy. Susan finds something about the movement of his body (the odd bobbing) suspicious. After putting on her goggles, she looks under the surface, and sees several sharks circling her in the water and one seems to dart her way. Susan apparently decides to commit suicide, as she stops trying to keep herself afloat, and allows herself to sink underwater by releasing air from her mouth. The audience is never told or shown her fate, but are left to assume she fell victim to the sharks, as Daniel had. {Her last scene shows her releasing her scuba tanks and then going straight down - implying that a shark has taken her}.

As the credits roll after Susan supposedly commits suicide, a crew of fisherman cuts open the insides of a shark's stomach, finding an underwater-use camera, similar to what Daniel and Susan had had with them. One of the dissectors asks "Wonder if it works?"
Open Water is notable in that the filmmakers used living sharks, as opposed to the mechanical ones used in Jaws or the computer-generated fish in Deep Blue Sea. The movie strives for authentic shark behavior, shunning the stereotypical exaggerated shark behavior typical of many films. As noted above, the events that inspired this story took place in the South Pacific; this movie moves the location to the Caribbean.

Three days after the DVD release of Open Water, filmmakers Chris Kentis, Laura Lau and their seven-year-old daughter, had their own encounter with ocean dangers in what the Associated Press called "a real-life version of their shark thriller Open Water." Kentis stated that the DVD release was "meaningless" in comparison with his nightmarish experience that same week. Vacationing in Thailand, Kentis and his family survived the tsunami that killed 117,000. Lau and her daughter were trapped in a second-floor Internet cafe but escaped, as described in an AP story:

Lau, 41, said she pulled about a half-dozen Swedish tourists to safety using a bamboo ladder before using it herself to escape from the cafe's balcony with Sabrina on her back. They reached Kentis by hiking in waist-deep water back to the hotel. The couple then hiked several miles into the mountains with their luggage because they were afraid another massive wave was coming. They took two minicabs to Phuket's east coast, which Kentis said seemed almost unaffected by the tsunami. "When we got there, it was all people on yachts having a good time. It was just surreal," Kentis said. "Two hours later, our kids were swimming in this beautiful hotel pool and we're ordering food."