The shark-survival thriller has quietly become one of independent cinema’s most dependable financial instruments. Ever since Open Water proved that a single actor, a patch of open sea and a primal predator could travel the world, foreign buyers have been willing to commit to these films sight unseen — a movie star, a poster and a logline are collateral enough. Highland Film Group’s White is the latest entry engineered to that formula, and the casting of Carla Woodcock as its lead completes an above-the-title lineup built less for the multiplex than for the international sales floor.

Woodcock, the British actress who has been raising her profile through the Outlander universe, takes the central role of Willa Harba, a struggling actress whose private jet goes down over the Pacific. As The Hollywood Reporter first reported, she plays the sole survivor, stranded on a shattered wing with nothing but a satellite phone — and the stretch of ocean beneath her happens to be the White Shark Cafe, a real gathering ground where great whites congregate to feed.

The distress calls are what give the film its stars. Kate Beckinsale — who also executive produces — plays Willa’s self-absorbed studio boss, who picks up the call and brushes her employee off; Katherine McNamara is Sam Swatek, the marine biologist who intercepts the signal and delivers the bad news. It is a neat piece of packaging: three above-the-title women, most of their scenes conducted down a phone line, a structure that keeps the budget lean while stacking the one-sheet with names.

Behind the camera is Jake West, the British genre director of cult items like Doghouse and Evil Aliens, graduating from midnight-movie budgets to a star-fronted survival actioner. He works from a screenplay by Dan Schaffer, creator of the cult comic Dogwitch — a pairing that leans into the discipline these single-location thrillers demand, where tension has to be manufactured from geography and dwindling options rather than spectacle.

Highland is handling worldwide rights and co-financing, with Yariv Lerner producing, and the company arrived at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival with the picture already carrying multiple pre-sales — the surest sign a genre package has found its buyers before principal photography. Production is set for the summer across Bulgaria, England and the United States, and no release date has yet been announced.

It is a fitting image for a business that runs on the promise of a rescue that may never come: a stranded actress on a broken wing, a satellite phone in her hand, and the one person who could send help deciding she is not worth the trouble. The sharks, in the end, may be the least of Willa’s problems.

Tags: casting, Kate Beckinsale, Carla Woodcock, Jake West, Katherine McNamara, White