Chum, directed by Jonathan Zuck, enters the 2026 shark-thriller cycle with a premise that sounds ready-made for grisly B-movie pleasure. A destination wedding in Malta curdles almost instantly after newlyweds Tina and Tom head out on a boat trip with friends, only to meet a shark with excellent timing and a fisherman named Roy with far worse intentions. What looks like rescue becomes captivity, and the open sea turns into a floating chamber of panic, resentment, and very questionable planning.
The setup has the bones of a nasty little survival thriller. There is sun-baked scenery, marital fracture, predatory water, and a human antagonist who thinks grief gives him a license to weaponize strangers. That could be enough. Shark cinema has survived on less.
The trouble is execution. Chum has Alice Eve, a clean commercial hook, and Malta’s blue water as visual bait, yet the film struggles to generate dread. Its logic leaks faster than its boat, its characters rarely feel like people, and its shark effects keep asking the viewer to believe in danger while loudly announcing the machinery behind it.
Story Logic Lost at Sea
The film’s narrative frame is built around a marriage that seems doomed before the reception plates are cleared. Tina, played by Alice Eve, and Tom, played by Eric Michael Cole, carry the tension of a couple who should have postponed the ceremony, if only to spare the catering staff the awkward vibes.
Their conflict sits partly around Tina’s legal career and Tom’s moral objection to her new client, an oil company. That detail points toward an environmental thread, with rising sea temperatures supposedly pushing sharks into unfamiliar waters, yet the movie treats the idea like decorative seaweed.
The annulment angle arrives early, and it gives the wedding a strange emotional hollowness. Rather than creating tragic irony, it makes the group’s post-wedding boat trip feel like a logistical error with champagne. The friends pressure the couple into the outing, and soon the vessel is attacked, damaged, and set on a path toward Roy’s intervention.
Roy is the film’s clearest genre idea. His wife was killed by a shark years earlier, and his grief has hardened into ritualized violence. He rescues stranded people, imprisons them, and uses them as live bait in a diving cage. This has the outline of marine noir: a bereaved man turns the sea into his private courtroom, declares the shark guilty, then drafts random civilians as evidence. A grim idea. A cruel idea. Maybe even a good one.
The script rarely lets it breathe. Roy’s methods feel less like obsession than screenwriting delay tactics. He gets near the shark, he has weapons, he has opportunities, and still he continues staging a revenge plan so inefficient it might qualify as performance art. His backstory also shifts in ways that damage the film’s foundation. Narration, flashback, and later explanation do not appear fully aligned, which is a problem for a movie whose entire plot depends on that trauma.
Spatial logic fares no better. Characters speak of being far out at sea while land sits in the background like an unpaid extra. The shark appears according to scene convenience, vanishing and returning without a clear predator rhythm. Good shark thrillers understand geography. The viewer needs to feel distance, depth, current, and vulnerability. Chum gives us water, people, and panic, then hopes proximity will do the rest.
Alice Eve Against the Tide
Tina is the closest thing Chum has to a functional protagonist, largely because Alice Eve gives the role shape that the writing only sketches. Tina is framed as the most active survivor, the one who challenges Roy, reads danger faster than the others, and refuses to remain a floating victim. Eve brings a crispness to her reactions, a trained alertness in the eyes and shoulders. She plays fear as calculation rather than simple screaming, which briefly gives the film a pulse.
Her character arc, sadly, is rushed through blunt emotional markers. The marriage crisis with Tom should give the survival story a moral undertow. Two people facing death after realizing their union has already collapsed is a sharp dramatic premise. The film handles it like a checklist: professional disagreement, resentment, separation talk, peril, confrontation. The pieces are present, yet they rarely connect with much feeling.
Tom is mostly defined by complaint. His frustration over Tina’s work could have opened a sharper ethical conflict, especially with the environmental material hovering around the plot. Instead, he becomes another voice in a noisy ensemble, often reacting rather than revealing himself. The wedding party around them fares worse. Tina’s sister Sadie and the other friends largely exist as shark-thriller inventory, bodies waiting for water, teeth, and screaming.
This weakens the survival stakes. Horror can thrive on unlikeable characters, but it still needs behavioral texture. Here, the group often seems entitled, passive, or bizarrely slow to grasp the obvious. Once Roy’s plan becomes clear, their inability to overpower or outmaneuver him begins to feel less like terror and closer to a team-building exercise gone catastrophically wrong.
Roy should dominate the film as the human predator. Jim Klock’s performance, though, rarely finds the cold menace or spiritual rot that the role demands. Roy is built from grief, sadism, and wounded masculine fixation, but the film does not sculpt those traits into a coherent psychological profile. He explains too much, controls too little, and misses too often. A noir villain needs shadow. Roy gets exposition and a harpoon.
The concept is stronger than the character. A man who turns private loss into public violence has moral weight. He could have been an existential mirror for Tina and Tom, forcing them to ask what survival costs and who gets sacrificed for another person’s closure. Chum gestures at that darker water, then paddles away.
Blood in the Water, Pixels on the Surface
The shark is the film’s advertised attraction, and a few isolated images have a certain low-budget polish. In stillness, the creature can look serviceable. The familiar ingredients are all here: crimson water, severed limbs, sudden breaches, bodies dragged under, and panicked faces framed against the blank indifference of the sea. Zuck understands the appeal of the genre’s basic iconography. A dorsal fin still has power. The human brain has been trained by decades of aquatic cinema to fear that triangle.
Movement is where the illusion begins to sink. The shark attacks often appear waxy, blurry, or physically weightless, especially when splashes and digital blood dominate the frame. Underwater horror depends on texture: drag, pressure, murk, refracted light, the strange softness of movement beneath the surface. Chum struggles with those elements. The creature seems pasted into the world rather than emerging from it.
The gore has a similar problem. There is blood and there are limbs, yet the staging often obscures impact. Violence should either shock through clarity or disturb through suggestion. Here it can feel smeared, caught between graphic intent and visual confusion.
Repetition makes the issue worse. The more the film shows the shark, the more the viewer inspects it, and inspection is fatal to shaky effects work. Suspense lives in concealment. This shark keeps auditioning under bad lighting.
A late sequence gives the movie a brief jolt of manic energy, and for a few minutes the film appears to discover the pulp rhythm it had been chasing. The action loosens, the danger feels wilder, and the absurdity briefly becomes an asset. One almost wishes the whole film had leaned into that feverish register. Almost.
The technical issues extend beyond creature work. ADR is prominent enough to become distracting, with dialogue that often feels detached from bodies and space. Some lines appear to emerge from angles where mouths are hidden or plainly inactive. Sound design should manipulate perception, especially in survival horror, where silence, creaking hulls, distant splashes, and muffled underwater noise can bend the audience’s nerves. Here, the soundscape rarely develops that psychological grip.
Visually, Malta gives the film a handsome canvas, all blue glare and tourist-board menace. Yet the setting feels underused. There is little cultural texture, little sense that this nightmare belongs to its location. Nearly every major character sounding American turns Malta into a backdrop rather than a lived environment. The sea looks inviting. The movie makes it feel oddly generic.
A B-Movie Without the Bite
Chum has the raw material for a lean, mean shark thriller: a collapsing marriage, a wedding party full of disposable privilege, a revenge-sick fisherman, a scenic coastline, and a predator circling beneath them. The title promises blunt-force nastiness, the kind of genre picture that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and still goes for the throat.
The film never fully commits to that personality. It gestures toward grief, ecological disruption, class resentment, and marital disillusionment, yet those ideas remain near the surface. They bob there, visible and unused. The result feels too stiff for camp, too clumsy for serious suspense, and too thin for character-driven horror.
There are flashes of accidental comedy, some of them welcome. A strange line reading here, a baffling decision there, Roy’s apparent dedication to being the least efficient shark hunter in the Mediterranean. Dry humor is not always intentional, but cinema is generous that way.
Alice Eve gives the film its most credible human center, and the Malta location offers occasional visual pleasure. The shark may satisfy viewers seeking brief bursts of creature chaos. Still, Chum feels stranded long before its characters are. Its best movie exists in the premise, circling just beneath the surface, while the finished version keeps throwing weaker bait into the water.
Chum is a creature-feature survival horror film that premiered globally on June 5, 2026. The suspenseful narrative opens at a lavish destination wedding reception on the Mediterranean coast of Malta. The celebratory atmosphere quickly turns to terror when the wedding party boards a catamaran for an excursion and falls victim to a brutal shark attack. Stranded in open water, the survivors are rescued by a mysterious fisherman named Roy, only to discover that their savior harbors a dark, personal vendetta against the predator and intends to use them as bait. Moviegoers can watch this tense indie thriller on premium video-on-demand digital platforms or through regional independent theatrical screenings.
Where to Watch Chum (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Chum
Distributor: Independent Film Company, Film Bridge International
Release date: June 5, 2026
Running time: 87 minutes
Director: Jonathan Zuck
Writers: Jonathan Zuck, Joe Leone
Producers and Executive Producers: Luke Daniels, James Kondelik, Joe Leone
Cast: Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond, Sarah Siadat, Jim Klock, Johnny Gaffney, Lisa Yaro, Robert Grose
The Review
Chum
Chum has the bones of a sharp, nasty shark thriller, but its weak logic, thin characters, uneven performances, and shaky effects leave it adrift. Alice Eve brings needed focus, and Malta offers a handsome backdrop, yet the film rarely builds real fear or pulpy fun. A few late bursts of chaos hint at a better movie beneath the surface.
PROS
- Alice Eve gives the film some credibility
- Malta provides attractive scenery
- A few shark shots work in stillness
- Late action briefly adds energy
CONS
- Weak story logic
- Thin supporting characters
- Unconvincing shark movement
- Distracting ADR
- Roy lacks real menace
- Environmental theme feels underused
