Chum Review: Jonathan Zuck’s AI Shark Sinks a Clever Idea

A clever twin-predator premise, handed to a machine and edited into noise.

Chum | Jonathan Zuck | 2026 | 87 min | NR |

Jonathan Zuck’s Chum drops a Maltese destination wedding into open water and lets two predators loose on it: a great white shark and a vengeful fisherman played by Jim Klock. Alice Eve leads a cast of holidaymakers turned bait in a shark-attack horror that doubles as a climate-change parable, warming seas dragging a monster somewhere it was never meant to be. Released in June 2026 through Independent Film Company, the film reaches for the serial killer thriller and the creature feature at once, and reaches for generative AI to build its beast. Here is why it goes under.

Chum Review: Jonathan Zuck’s AI Shark Sinks a Clever Idea

The shark is the tell. It slides through the Maltese blue with the buffed, frictionless sheen of something a machine dreamed up over a long weekend, and every scrap of menace drains out through that smoothness. A great white is meant to carry weight. Threat. The suggestion of a real body shoving real water aside. This one carries nothing. It is a screensaver with teeth, and once you have clocked it, you cannot unclock it for the remaining hour or so.

Which is a shame, because somewhere underneath Chum there is a film I wanted to root for. The premise is sharp. Take a wedding party out onto the open Mediterranean, drop a great white into the water beneath them, and then, just as the survivors are dragged to safety, reveal that the fisherman who saved them has a use for them. He wants bait. Two predators, one boat, and a group of holidaymakers caught in the gap between them. That is a good idea. If a little bit like Dangerous Animals. You could build a lean, nasty little thriller on that frame and send people home rattled.

Zuck almost does. Then he shows you the shark, and shows you it again, and again, and the whole thing comes apart in his hands.

Watch how quickly it goes wrong. The film opens on Roy, the fisherman, unspooling the backstory of a wife lost to a great white, and the monologue reaches so hard for gravitas that it topples straight over into unintentional comedy. He is a man, you understand, and a man does not forget. Sure thing, Roy. From there we cut to the newlyweds, Tina and Tom, who are already discussing an annulment before the confetti has been swept up. There is a decent seed of dread in that, a marriage rotting in real time, but the picture never lets it breathe. It is too busy hurrying everyone onto the boat so the circling can begin.

Once the circling does begin, the craft problems arrive in a shoal. Steven Spielberg spent an entire production fighting a mechanical shark that refused to work, and the accident of the century was that the malfunction forced him to hide it. Absence did the heavy lifting.

Chum has no such discipline. The great white is everywhere, front and centre, lit and framed like a leading man, and because it never once looks like it is actually in the water with the actors, the fear has nowhere to gather. Horror lives in the half-second before you see the thing. Give me the fin, the shadow, the shape under the hull. Do not give me a clean render doing lengths of the pool.

The editing offers no rescue. The set pieces are cut so fast and so loose that the geography of them dissolves. In one attack I could not tell you where anyone was standing, who was in the water, or what the person on screen was actually trying to do to get away.

A kill should have shape: a beginning, a turn, a horrible inevitability. Here they arrive as a scramble of angles, chopped to ribbons, and then it is over and someone is gone and you are left assembling the maths after the fact. Even a good moment, and there is a nicely claustrophobic beat with a submerged diving cage, gets diced past the point of legibility. Jojo Draven’s score works overtime to tell you when to be scared, which is usually the sign that the images have stopped managing it on their own.

The cast are stranded by all this, which is the part that stings. Alice Eve plays Tina, a bride who cannot swim and did not want to be on the boat, and she throws herself at the role with more commitment than the surrounding film has earned. Eve is also a co-producer here, so this is plainly a project she believed in, and you can feel her working to give Tina an inner life: a woman whose marriage has quietly failed before the honeymoon has properly started.

Eric Michael Cole gets thinner material as Tom, the husband on the other side of that collapse. The wider party, Sarah Siadat, Johnny Gaffney and Lisa Yaro among them, are sketched too lightly to leave a mark, and Elle Haymond, as Tina’s sister Sadie, is handed the kind of writing no performer could lift off the page.

The one turn with any real flavour belongs to Jim Klock as Roy. Klock commits fully to the pulp of a man who has been nursing his grudge against the sea for years, and there is a game, gravelly relish in him that the rest of the film could have used more of. I did not for a second believe Roy. I did, however, enjoy watching Klock try, which is more than the shark ever gave me. When your most alive element is the human villain and not the apex predator you have spent your budget rendering, something has gone wrong at the planning stage.

And then there is the message, because Chum is, underneath the fins and the blood, a climate change film. Zuck has been open about this. Malta does not have great whites; the real sharks in those waters are small and harmless, so the script asks why a monster would be circling that particular coast, and answers with warming seas.

It is a tidy piece of plotting, and, going by the reports of great whites turning up off Ireland and New England, an oddly prescient one. The film even folds the argument into the marriage. Tina is a lawyer who acts for the oil industry. Tom works for Greenpeace. Their union is the planetary row in miniature, played out over champagne and simmering resentment.

I have no problem with a creature feature that wants to say something. The best of them always have; the shark was never only a shark. The problem is the delivery. The message here is not threaded through the story so much as bolted to its side, announced in dialogue and character shorthand rather than felt in the horror. When the argument is that literal, a lawyer for Big Oil wed to a Greenpeace activist, the film stops trusting you to join the dots and starts drawing them for you in crayon.

There is a deeper irony too, and it is hard to sail past. A film pleading with us to take the health of the natural world seriously has built its central monster, its reddened water and its fire, out of generative AI. There is something genuinely odd about an eco-parable outsourcing its craft to one of the most energy-hungry tools going. I doubt the contradiction was intended. It sits there all the same, grinning, right in the centre of the frame. The credits reportedly list something in the region of twenty producers, and their combined efforts have delivered a shark that a decade of cheap practical work would have bettered.

The strange part is that Zuck knows how to make a film for very little money, and has done it before. Within the Darkness, his 2016 ghost-hunting horror, worked precisely because it understood restraint: it kept its scares implied, its effects sparing, and let a decent cast carry the load. His 2018 road comedy Meant to Be Broken, written like Chum with Joe Leone, showed he could handle character and tone on a shoestring. What baffles me about Chum is that it forgets the lesson his own earlier work taught him. The 2016 film hid its horrors and was better for it. This one cannot stop showing you the thing that least survives being shown.

Chum surfaces in a busy year for shark cinema. Renny Harlin’s Deep Water and Tommy Wirkola’s Thrash both appeared in 2026, and neither exactly restored the sub-genre’s dignity. But the film Chum most invites you to measure it against is last year’s Dangerous Animals, Sean Byrne’s shark-and-serial-killer picture, which took almost the same collision, a marine predator and a human one, and made it sing. Byrne grasped that the man is the real horror and the shark is the weather. Chum wants that same doubling, and it has the pieces for it in Klock’s fisherman, yet it keeps cutting back to the weather when it should be watching the man.

Set it beside Jaws, which Zuck openly reached for, and the gap is a canyon. Set it beside the knowingly daft end of the pool, the Meg and its cousins, and it is not silly enough to belong there either. It hovers in between, too earnest to be a romp and too clumsy to be a genuine chiller, and the beautiful Maltese light, shot with real care by Mac Fisken, keeps reminding you of the sharper film this could have been.

Because that is what I keep circling back to. The location is gorgeous. The idea is good. Eve is game, Klock is having fun, and the bones of a tight survival thriller are all present in the wreckage. Chum is not the work of people who did not care. It is the work of people who made one large, fatal choice about how to build their monster, and a run of smaller ones in the edit, and then watched the tension bleed out of every frame as a result.

There is a film in here fighting to reach the surface. It never gets there, and the thing holding it under is the one part of it that nobody actually built.

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