The Bay

Starring: Kether Donohue, Will Rogers, & Kristen Connolly

Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5 stars

The Bay is a message hidden within a film, similar to 2008's the Happening, The Bay tells of the consequences of destroying our environment. In this film, dumping into the Chesapeake Bay has caused a harmless fish parasite to evolve into a human killer. What makes this film unique is the way in which it was shot. The film is shot as a documentary that was posted on a fictional Wikileaks type site, and tells the story of the outbreak in a small Maryland town, on July 4th. The cinematography is made up of everything you'd see at a small town festival, camcorders, cell phone cameras, news footage, police dash-cams, and security cameras. Through a collection of footage from the day, we are told the story of the outbreak by one of the only survivors, who had to let the world know of this tragedy that was covered up by the U.S. government. The different angles and the fact that their really weren't any main characters also make this film unique. The story really isn't much, as it just like a million other horror films. Everything is normal, until people start getting sick, and chaos ensues. It's not the story or even the actors that keep you interested in this film, it's the different pieces put together in documentary form by the narrator, Kether Donohue. Without the narration, it's just a collection of web clips, but there is some interest in finding out what happened to each of the people we see and in seeing them figure out what's going on at the same time that we do. It's not a great story and there aren't any stand out performances, but the film itself is done in such a unique way, that it will be like nothing you've ever seen before. Yes, The Bay is another way of telling us about the dangers of not caring for our environment, in a story that is severely lacking imagination, but it's worth seeing, simply from a stylistic point of view.