Film / Under Paris

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Under Paris is a 2024 French action-horror disaster film. It is directed and written by Xavier Gens (Frontier(s), The Divide, The ABCs of Death (X is for XXL)) and stars Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant, and Sandra Parfait.

The movie concerns Sophia Assalas (Bejo), a marine researcher who is the Sole Survivor of a tragedy in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch involving "Lilith", an oversized mako shark that killed her team. Three years later, environmentalist Mika (Léviant) reveals to Sophia that Lilith's beacon is detected in the Seine, where it will be the site of a triathlon. With not a lot of time on their shoulders, Sophia, Mika, and police sergeant Adil (Lyes) realize that a much bigger problem awaits Paris if Lilith isn't dealt with and pull out all the stops to remove her from the Seine before it's too late.

The film is distributed by Netflix and was released on the platform on June 3, 2024.

Previews: Official Trailer👁 Image
. Official Trailer (English)👁 Image

Under Paris contains the following tropes.

• Animal Wrongs Group: Mika and Ben are part of a group of ambientalists that want to free sharks around the world and they are obsessed to free Lilith into the ocean without considering how dangerous it is.
• Apocalypse How: At the end of the movie Class 0, maybe, as many people are dead and Sophia and Adil appear to be the Sole Survivor’s with massive amounts of Paris now destroyed and flooded, leaving Lilith and her offspring uncontested as the capital of France suffers horrific damage.
• Artistic License – Marine Biology: A mako shark is not able to survive in the waters of the Seine, considering the absence of salt water and the space the shark needs to survive freely given its big size. It can be a fact of space or that the animal would had been mutated to the point to adapt quickly to freshwater, but still there is the question of how Lilith reached Paris without getting noticed by someone. Funnily enough, the issue of fresh water could all be avoided if the movie used bull sharks instead, which can tolerate fresh water and are more agressive than mako sharks.
• Artistic License – Physics: At the end of the movie, hundreds of bombs explode in the Seine, causing a giant tsunami and the destruction of many Parisian bridges. But after the explosion, the water just... stays there. All the buildings near the Seine are flooded up to their first floor. There is not a single explanation as to where this colossal quantity of water was before the explosion, or why it does not go back there.
• Attack of the Town Festival: The climax has Lilith attacking the swimmers of the triathlon. It's an utter bloodbath and it only goes From Bad to Worse.
• Bury Your Gays: Right before she first goes diving, Mika shares a kiss with her female friend Ben. They are some of the first meals on the shark's menu.
• Catch of the Doomsday: In one early scene, a man fishing with magnets in the Seine River pulls up an unexploded cannon shell from World War 2 and it is taken by the police. The cops mention to the press that there are still hundreds of unexploded shells at the bottom of the river, which is Foreshadowing to the climax in which gunfire from the Paris Police trying to kill Lilith the snark hits the shells, leading to all of them exploding with enough force to cause a tsunami that floods Paris.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the start of the movie, Adil and his team removed a live artillery shell from the bottom of the Seine, mentioning how dangerous they are if not dealt carefully. The military's firing bullets at Lilith causes a few strays to hit one of the shells, leading to a chain reaction that floods the center of Paris.
• Death of a Child: The midpoint action sequence in which the police tries to shut down Mika's Animal Wrongs Group activity not only leads Lilith and her progeny eating a lot of teenagers — including Mika — but Lilith ripping the head off the one member of said progeny that was peaceful.
• Downer Beginning: The movie starts with Lilith killing four members of a dive team, including Sophia's husband Chris. Sophia diving into the water leads her dragged by a fishing net by Lilith, and while she survives she is seriously injured by the decompression.
• Downer Ending: The efforts to wipe out Lilith and her off-spring instead lead to Sophia and Adil as the Sole Survivors and the center of Paris flooded, with the new shark species thriving in the flooded domain. The end credits hint that Lilith and her descendants will spread across the world and up the various rivers, including rivers near population centers like London and New York.
• Expy Coexistence: The triathlon that is the vested interest for the Mayor Pain of Paris is not the 2024 Olympics triathlon, but another triathlon that is meant to be a test run for the Olympics one and boost PR for the other event.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The mayor played by Anne Marivin is never given a name, and is only listed in the credits the "Mayor of Paris."
• Freakier Than Fiction: On paper, a shark whose primary reproduction method is parthenogenesis sounds unrealistic. But in 2007, a A bonnethead shark (related to the hammerhead) female at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska gave birth to a pup via parthenogenesis👁 Image
  , with DNA analysis confirming a perfect match.
• From Bad to Worse: An oversized mako shark lost and defensive in the unfamiliar River Seine is bad enough. A mako shark that can breed on her own and has mutant children that can survive in fresh water is even worse.
• Green Aesop: Pollution of the oceans is the reason Lilith the mako shark mutated into a huge, super-fast, fiendishly clever and determined man-eater that is capable of parthenogenesis in huge quantities.
• Hate Sink: The Mayor of Paris is a selfish, corrupt bureaucrat who decides not to postpone the triathlon despite being frequently warned about the growing shark infestation in the Seine. Her selfish decisions not only lead to the sharks escaping and killing many innocent people, but indirectly trigger a tsunami that sinks half of Paris, as well as the sharks migrating to every continent on the planet.
• Hope Spot: The plan to blow up the part of the Catacombs where Lilith and her brood are nesting is achieved although at great cost to the cast, but Sophia feels a need to dive again and look at the destruction… and she sees with her own eyes as Lillith bursts out from the wreckage little worse for the wear and it is revealed a few minutes later that plenty of her brood survived as well.
• Lethally Stupid: The environmentalists summoned by Mika go on a huge stampede to get away when Lilith attacks leading to a number of them getting killed either because they push each other right into the waters where Lilith and her progeny feast on them or stomp each other senseless and leave them to drown, which gets Ben killed.
• Mayor Pain: The Mayor of Paris is, appropriately enough for a shark film, taking a page off Larry Vaughn's playbook.
• Naïve Animal Lover: A severely Deconstructed version of this with Mika. An environmentalist, she sees sharks as victims of human exploitation, which isn't wrong. However, she fails to remember that sharks like Lilith are predators and aren't comfortable with anyone invading their territory or making unwanted contact with their offsprings, which leads to to her death and twelve others, including her girlfriend Ben and police officer Leo, not helped by the fact that she goes as far as to turn off the tracking beacon in the hopes of saving the highly dangerous shark in question.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: So how many unexploded artillery shells are in the bottom of the Seine that hitting them with gunfire would create a tsunami?
• Ripped from the Headlines: The "event to attract tourism that the Mayor Pain will not stop no matter what" of this film being a triathlon taking place on the Seine River is based on the news that the 2024 Paris Olympics would set their triathlon on the river.
• Suit with Vested Interests: The Mayor of Paris makes clear very early in the film that the government of France has invested billions of dollars to clean up the Seine for the triathlon and she will be damned if the city (and her) loses face (and tourism money to pay back the investment) by pushing the panic button, so she orders everybody to deal with the shark infestation quietly.
• Threatening Shark: Lilith, she is a huge intelligent mako shark that tears through scores of people and what’s worse is the main characters discover she and her offspring are capable of asexual reproduction, meaning they now are not just dealing with one or two intelligent dangerous predators stalking the Seine, but dozens.
• Tourism-Derailing Event: The Mayor Pain of Paris orders the police to stop the mutant man-eating shark that is currently inhabiting the Seine River very quickly and quietly because the French government has spent millions of dollars cleaning up the river and readying a triathlon that is not the 2024 Paris Olympics triathlon but is very heavily implied to be a test run for it and if tourists decide not to come because of the fear of a shark attack it will be a financial ruin and a lot of egg on the government (and her). Even after lots of sacrifice from the cops, the shark attacks the triathlon at the climax and the mayhem it causes escalates to an insane degree culminating in the destruction of Paris.
• Truly Single Parent: As part of their status as a new and dangerous species, Lilith and her kind can reproduce by Parthenogenesis👁 Image
  without need of a male. Even a deceased juvenile shark was revealed to have embryos inside.
• Unexploded Military Ordnance: In one early scene, a man fishing with magnets in the Seine River pulls up an unexploded cannon shell from World War 2 and it is taken by the police. The cops mention to the press that there are still hundreds of unexploded shells at the bottom of the river, which is Foreshadowing to the climax in which gunfire from the Paris Police trying to kill Lilith the snark hits the shells, leading to all of them exploding with enough force to cause a tsunami that floods Paris.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Sophia reams at Mika for turning off Lilith's beacon, as that would have put the police officers searching for her in danger without knowledge of her exact location.