The Bay may be the most unusual work in Barry Levinson’s filmography as well as one of the oddest instances of found footage. It started out as a documentary about pollution in Chesapeake Bay – a plea on behalf of Levinson’s beloved Maryland. However, Levinson apparently believed that this wouldn’t have sufficient cut-through so he decided to dress it up as found footage horror. Michael Wallach’s screenplay hews close to the facts in presenting one-quarter of the Bay as a dead zone due to decades of factory runoff. However, in this case, that runoff spawns a population of isopods who grow to mammoth sizes, both in the water and inside the bodies of people who swim in the water. With the government quarantining the Bay and placing a media embargo on all reporting, it takes a journalism student to compile and upload footage to a GovLeaks website for the full story to come out.    

For the first part of the film, that plays a bit like epidemiological horror – a digital-viral event disrupting the comforting textures of small town America. During these early scenes, it seems there’s going to be a main character – the journalist student, Donna Thompson (Kether Donahue) who has been assigned to the town’s media outlets on an internship. The event takes place on July 4^th, so the town is awash with all the local colour that makes for fluffy, feel-good journalism. Donna interviews her way from the Miss Crustacean contestants to the crab-eating competition to the mayor, a former vacuum salesman, as a local radio host play’s Aaron Copland’s “Our Town.” Levinson’s love for Maryland and his sensitivity to his regional peculiarities come to the fore during these scenes, which are the most evocative in the film.

All this cosiness is disrupted, however, as the polluted water, and the isopods it has spawned, start to make themselves felt. What ensues plays a bit like a New Hollywood sensibility transferred to found footage, with a particular indebtedness to Jaws. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several critics recovered Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece as an epidemic text, noting the similarity between the shark and the virus as threats lurking at the edge of a community. Levinson both pre-empts and makes good on that analogy here. As with Jaws, a coastal town is thrown into disarray by a freakish aquamarine event that local government is keen to whitewash to maintain the lucrative tourist market. The difference from Jaws is that the cover-up extends to the federal government, partly due to the proximity to Washington D.C. and partly because of the degree of the catastrophe that ensues. Richard Dreyfus’ scientist now becomes a pair of marine researchers whose critical work occurs not after but just before the environmental event. By the time their footage emerges, it is already too late.

However, none of that quite speaks to the most unusual feature of The Bay, which results from the film’s position at the very tail end of the genre’s golden period. In 2012, smart phone footage was almost omniscient but not quite, forcing films (especially found footage films) to really scramble to keep up with the future. While The Bay has virtually no smart phone footage it compensates by drawing on an enormous array of other types of footage, from personal blogs to oceanographic records to home videos to surveillance cameras. Given that this is all compiled from disparate points around the bay at discrete moments in the outbreak, the effect is more that of a media collage or a 24-hour news channel than of found footage per se. You never get the sense of being trapped inside the recording device, as so often occurs within this particular genre. In fact, Levinson goes in the exact opposite direction, as if to diffuse the horror so much that it simply dilutes back into his original documentary vision.

In that sense The Bay proves that a good found footage film needs to do more than simply present us with the footage, in the  manner of a readymade artwork. Levinson offers no real rationale for why the material on view has been recorded (a critical part of the genre) and there’s not a great deal of art in how it’s all put together. Most of the footage is quite ugly and murky and yet that makes it all the more extraordinary in that so little of this takes place underwater or attempts to craft a more intriguing origin story for the environmental catastrophe. Worse, Levinson often seems to be deliberately shying away from horror, never sinking long enough into any one scene to allow suspense to build. More often than not he jarringly undercuts what little residual suspense accrues, opting for a photographic more than cinematic lens, attuned above all to the stationary security cameras that contour the action.

The Bay thereby comes to feel bad faith in the same way that Blair Witch: Book of Shadows felt bad faith. Both films fear being “mere” horror above all else and yet what Levinson’s film ultimately proves is how easily the uncanny valley between found footage and documentary can devolve into dissociated images. The premise becomes pretty derivative of Alien, Levinson shrugs off zombie horror (a natural trajectory for many scenes) and struggles whenever characters and cameras move through space in a three-dimensional manner. Ironically, the closing credits, which pair casual and incidental home video footage of the lake with a looming score, are the eeriest and most memorable part of the film. They prove what Levinson could have done if he had just sunk into a handheld naturalism and embraced the horror that always seems about to emerge organically, only for him to throttle and repress it.