Above & Below traps Laura Marano in a shark cage beneath Antonio Banderas’s cartel

A shark cage is built to keep a diver safe. In Above & Below, Jesse V. Johnson’s cartel-and-sharks thriller, it becomes a workplace and a cell at once: Laura Marano and Christina Ochoa end up trapped inside it on the seabed with their air running low, while the gang of Antonio Banderas‘s cartel boss closes in from above.

The title is the blueprint: two spaces, stacked. Below the surface, great white sharks and a dwindling oxygen supply. Above it, a boat and an armed crew. The premise’s one real idea is that neither space is an exit, and the story is built so that coming up is as dangerous as staying down.

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The casting splits along the same line. Banderas plays Burns, a trafficker who treats a group of vacationing friends as disposable labor and forces them to retrieve a bag of cocaine from the ocean floor. He is the threat above. Marano, best known from the Disney Channel sitcom Austin & Ally and Netflix romantic comedies, plays Tatiana, the young woman trapped below. Christina Ochoa, the Spanish actress, plays her best friend, the second person in the cage. The casting pairs an actor audiences know as menace with one they know from family television, and puts the second one underwater.

Even a severe two-star review granted that Banderas is not there for a glorified cameo and is genuinely acting. What the casting suggests is a villain defined by position rather than volume, the opposite of the operatic heavies the genre usually hands to a star of his size. In the premise, the threat from above never has to dive. The sharks and the clock do the work.

Johnson came up through stunt work before directing, and his recent run has been lean action that mostly reached audiences through streaming and rental, with titles such as White Elephant and Chief of Station. Above & Below is his move into water, and at least one review that was cool on the script still called it the most technically accomplished film of his career. The shift in scale is visible in who was hired to light it.

The cinematographer is Maxime Alexandre, the Belgian director of photography behind Alexandre Aja’s High Tension and Crawl, the alligator film set inside a flooding house. Alexandre has already shot a confined space filling with a predator. The still released with the film shows the version of that idea here: a great white in blue-grey water and, beside it, a diver kneeling inside the bars of the cage, a frame within the frame. The film was shot in Spain, which stands in for the Mexican coast of the story, and the score is by Maria Vertiz.

The ticking element is air. With oxygen running out on the seabed, the premise turns every breath into a countdown, and the story sets two different kinds of pressure against each other: the sharks below and the cartel above. Whether the edit keeps that pressure steady is the question the reviews answer less kindly.

The markets have each picked a half of the picture to sell. Korea calls the film 카르텔 오션, Cartel Ocean, and leads with the criminals. Spain calls it Peligro en las profundidades, leaning on the depth. Brazil chose Entre Céu e Mar, between sky and sea, which may be the most honest translation of the title’s geometry.

What the film does not solve is the space between those halves. Reviews have faulted a slow first act that takes too long to get anyone into the water, flat supporting performances and at least one shark bite that leaves little more than scratches. On Rotten Tomatoes the film sat at 46 percent from 13 critics at the time of writing. The premise also arrives in a crowded lane. The trapped-in-open-water thriller has been worked hard by films like 47 Meters Down and The Shallows, and a cartel subplot adds plot mechanics rather than a new fear. Spain, a co-producing country with a Spanish star in the cast, received it as a rental title rather than a theatrical event.

The cast also includes Diego Llinás, Timothy V. Murphy, Louis Mandylor, Jess Liaudin, Donncha Tynan, Ryan Bertroche, Ramiro Alonso, Rodrigo Poisón and Mario Tardón. The screenplay is by Tony Giordano. The producers include David Hillary, Carmen Aguado, Manu Vega and Frank Ariza, for the Spanish companies AF Films and Match Point, with Capstone Pictures handling international sales. The film runs 95 minutes.

Above & Below opened in US theaters on July 29, 2026, through Aura Entertainment. In South Korea it opens in cinemas on September 30, 2026, as 카르텔 오션, released by Kinolights. In Spain it is already available to rent on digital platforms as Peligro en las profundidades.

The sharks sell the film. The cage is the film: a box that promises protection and delivers a deadline.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Thriller, Antonio Banderas, Laura Marano, crime, Jesse V. Johnson, Above & Below

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