Jess (Ella-Rae Smith) agrees to a summer at sea with Ben (Matthew Daddario) after they meet and stay the night on his boat that same day. Jess trusts him, even though they were docked when she fell asleep, only to awaken the next day far away from shore. They continue further into the sea until they collide with Lexie (Jessica Alexander), unconscious on a sea-doo. They bring her onboard, clean up her injury, and wind up partying as the boat engine isn’t working, and the wind isn’t strong enough to set sail for land.

Ben suggests the three take drugs to up their fun. Jess is hesitant but does so anyway. Lexie fakes taking hers and disposes of it without anyone noticing. The three continue to party the rest of the night away. Jess wakes up hungover and looks for Ben and Lexie. She finds Ben unconscious in the engine room. Lexie rushes in with blood on her face, exclaiming that the engines worked all along and that Ben assaulted and threatened her. Either Ben or Lexie is lying, and Jess must decide who to help in order to survive.

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Alongside Smith, Daddario, and Alexander in the cast of Into the Deep are Nikkita Chadha, Jack Morris, Andrew Steele, and Michael Workeye. It’s directed by Kate Cox and written by David Beton.

“My character Lexie is very complex and dark, a woman who is somewhat hell-bent on revenge,” commented Alexander, “she’s had a very traumatizing past and is consequently damaged, and is basically a sort of mystery woman.”

Shooting Into the Deep at Sea

Into the Deep was shot in Cornwall, England, “a beautiful sort of microclimate of its own in the UK. We shot for 10 days, I think, on the actual boat. And then everything you see that is below deck was assembled. But everything that you see on deck, we were at sea with no land in sight,” explained Alexander.

“We drank a lot of ginger beer,” laughed Alexander when asked about the motion sickness and other challenges that come along with shooting at sea. “I think more than anything, it was a testament to the beautiful teamwork that is involved in filmmaking. It’s insane having a film crew on a space that small, surrounded by water. So, I think that was the main challenge… to get everything that we needed in the time that we had. And, you know, doing fight scenes and stuff on a deck, in a moving boat.”

Alexander continued, commenting on the preparation that went in to capture everything on the boat. “We didn’t have loads of time with each other before we stepped foot onto the boat. We had a five-hour train ride to Cornwall where we sort of saw each other on the same train, and we were like, ‘Uh, are we in the same movie? Let’s be friends.’ But we had a couple of days of rehearsals in a room, which is very different, so there wasn’t really a way to prepare for it. We just sort of had to wing it, and a lot of the time in film people are winging it anyway but winging it on a ship was definitely a whole other layout.”

Raising the Stakes, Fellow Cast & Director

     Lionsgate

Certainly, filming on a boat at sea raises the production stakes, and additionally, does so for the characters in the film.

“I feel like the boat and the ocean are kind of their own characters in the movie as well. And I’m a massive fan of the containment genre and films that are set in one place. I do think it raises the stakes massively. There’s nowhere to run, there’s nowhere to hide, and in the same way, there’s not really any way to hide your secrets either,” said Alexander. “All sorts of dark, disturbing things start to come out. I mean claustrophobia is a real thing. You put a small number of people in a small space for a long enough period of time, and people will start doing things that they would never do normally. It turns you into sort of a caged animal, really, and I think that’s what my character goes through a little bit as she arrives on that boat… it can bring out the best and the worst and definitely raises the stakes and adds a whole new intense element to the movie.”

As for her fellow co-stars and director, Alexander commented, “I had actually heard of Ella. She’s a brilliant up-and-coming British actress, and I’d watched her… She’s just a total natural, and it was great getting to fight each other (laughs)… Matt as well was brilliant. Matt has a lot of experience, so it was a real honor to be working with someone who has so much… Kate came from a lot of fashion films, so she has a trained eye for how she wants a shot to look. She’s got a wonderful expression.”

Into the Deep comes to us from Lionsgate and is set to release in theaters, on demand, and digital on August 26, 2022.