The Requin

AT A GLANCE

The Requin review verdict: skip it. This 2022 Netflix shark thriller made the platform’s top ten list — which says more about Netflix’s algorithm than it does about the quality of the film.

The Requin Review: Netflix Put This in the Top Ten and That’s the Real Horror

The Requin review begins with a question that haunts the entire 90 minutes: how did this get made, and how did it make Netflix’s top ten? The shark thriller genre has produced some genuinely effective films — Jaws set the standard, The Shallows proved the premise still works in capable hands — and it has produced a lot of garbage. The Requin lands so far down the garbage end of that spectrum that it briefly becomes fascinating, the way a car crash is fascinating. Then that novelty wears off and you’re just stuck watching a bad movie.

What Is The Requin?

The Requin follows a couple on a vacation to Vietnam who find themselves stranded on a broken villa floating out to sea after a storm — and then menaced by sharks. The premise has potential. Survival thrillers with a contained setting and a single escalating threat can work on minimal budget if the tension is real and the characters are worth caring about. The Shallows built an entire film around one woman, one rock, and one shark and delivered genuine suspense. The Requin attempts something similar and fails at every single component.

Director Le-Van Kiet, whose action work elsewhere shows more competence than anything on display here, appears to have been working against a budget, a script, and a production timeline that gave him nothing to succeed with. The result is a film that never generates tension, never earns an emotional beat, and never convinces you for a single frame that anyone on screen is in any real danger.

The Experience

Watching The Requin is an exercise in mounting disbelief. The CGI sharks are among the worst rendered creatures in recent memory — not in a charming, low-budget, B-movie way, but in a way that actively destroys any attempt at suspense. Every time a shark appears on screen, the threat evaporates. You cannot be afraid of something that looks like it was animated by a first-year student on a deadline. The sharks in Sharknado were bad CGI, but Sharknado knew exactly what it was — a self-aware, deliberately ridiculous film that leaned into the absurdity and had a great time doing it. The Requin plays it straight. It wants you to be scared. That sincerity in the face of such poor execution makes the whole thing worse.

The performances do not help. The leads are handed a script that gives them nothing to work with — flat dialogue, underdeveloped backstory, and emotional beats that land with a thud because the film hasn’t done the work to earn them. There is a tragedy in the couple’s recent history that the script uses as emotional scaffolding, but it’s introduced so clumsily and referenced so mechanically that it never generates genuine feeling. You don’t fear for these characters because you never quite believe in them.

The pacing compounds every problem. The setup takes too long. The shark action, when it arrives, is too brief and too unconvincing to pay off the wait. The finale reaches for something dramatic and lands somewhere between unintentionally funny and deeply unsatisfying.

What Works

The Vietnamese coastal setting has genuine visual potential, and a handful of early establishing shots suggest what a competent production might have done with the location. That’s the complete list.

What Doesn’t

The CGI is the most immediate and sustained problem. A shark movie lives or dies on whether the shark is believable, and The Requin’s sharks never are — not for a second. Every appearance is a reminder that the effects budget was either nonexistent or badly spent, and no amount of fast cutting or tight framing fixes it.

The script gives the cast nothing. The dialogue is functional at best and awkward throughout. The emotional underpinning of the film — the couple’s grief and its effect on their relationship — is handled with so little care that it feels like a checklist item rather than a story. A film this thin on character has to deliver on pure survival tension, and The Requin cannot do that either because the shark looks fake.

The comparison to Sharknado is the most damning thing that can be said about it — and it’s accurate. Sharknado is a bad movie that became a franchise precisely because it committed fully to being a bad movie. The Requin appears to have genuinely tried to make a tense, serious shark thriller and produced something that plays like unintentional parody. Failing earnestly is harder to forgive than succeeding at being terrible on purpose.

Verdict

The Requin is not worth 90 minutes of your time. It is not enjoyably bad in the way that earns a cult following. It is not technically impressive enough to admire even in failure. It is simply a poorly made film that reached Netflix’s top ten because the platform’s algorithm rewards watch-time and curiosity clicks — and the title and thumbnail are just intriguing enough to get someone to press play.

Don’t be that person. There are better shark movies. There are better bad movies. There are better ways to spend an hour and a half.