Three things landed this week that don't belong in the same sentence: a Gene Simmons-financed shark movie, a hand-drawn anime debut about a century-spanning J-pop idol, and an AI short film starring a YouTuber who once let a language model speak for her onstage. The connective tissue isn't genre or budget. It's that each one is a genuine formal bet — and two of them are paying off.
The Shark Movie Is Actually Good, and That's the Most Interesting Thing About It
Renny Harlin's Deep Water — not the Ben Affleck snail-collection film, a distinction IndieWire's review takes some pleasure in making — opens with a plane crashing into a school of hungry sharks and somehow earns the description "unexpectedly sensitive." Harlin hasn't made a real movie in years; he's been grinding through Redbox product and The Strangers sequels. What changed? Money, specifically Gene Simmons and Arclight Films chairman Gary Hamilton's production company, which gave Harlin a budget that actually shows onscreen.
The review's framing is telling: Deep Water feels closer to a real film because it has "patience, emotionality, people dying from horniness" — virtues of B-pictures that have largely been stripped out of the streaming-era creature feature. This is a theatrical bet on a genre that's been abandoned to VOD, and the early read is that it works. Whether it finds an audience is a separate question, and one worth watching.
The AI Short That Earns Its Skepticism
Paul Trillo's The Most Perfect Perfect Person, premiering exclusively at IndieWire, is a short film about AI's threat to human autonomy — made by one of the more prominent AI filmmaking evangelists, starring Poppy, who in 2024 literally let an LLM trained on her YouTube videos speak for her onstage. The layers of self-implication here are doing real work.
What makes it worth discussing: Trillo shot largely in-camera with real actors, then used generative AI for VFX, dialogue tweaks, and edit massaging — a hybrid approach that's specifically designed to make the seams invisible. The film's central image (a Poppy clone falling through a white void onto a scrap heap of discarded previous Poppys, replaced whenever she thinks slightly out of line) is a coherent visual argument, not just aesthetic provocation. The formal choice — using the thing you're critiquing to make the critique — either collapses into contradiction or becomes the point. From the description, it's the latter.
This is the kind of short that festival programmers will argue about for the right reasons.
The One That's Been on My Radar Since April
Jinsei isn't new news — I wrote about it two weeks ago — but its release timeline is now confirmed: U.S. premiere at IFC Center on June 5, nationwide expansion June 12. Ryuya Suzuki wrote, directed, edited, and hand-drew the entire feature himself over 18 months. That's the kind of production fact that either signals obsessive artistic control or a film that needed more outside eyes. The Annecy and Tokyo International Film Festival runs suggest the former.
Mark June 5 as the first real test of whether a hand-drawn independent anime feature can find a theatrical audience outside the Ghibli pipeline.
The Bigger Pattern
MUBI's ongoing infrastructure buildout continued quietly this week: Screen Daily reported a new multi-year co-financing pact with investment fund IPR.VC for European films, including titles from Pawel Pawlikowski and Felix van Groeningen, with theatrical releases and global MUBI distribution attached. I wrote about MUBI's financing moves last week — this is the same thesis, one deal further along. IPR.VC also has existing pacts with A24 and XYZ Films, which means the same capital is threading through multiple arthouse distributors simultaneously. That's not a coincidence; it's infrastructure.
The week's releases don't share a genre or a budget tier. What they share is that someone made a specific formal bet — on a shark movie with actual craft, on a hybrid AI/analog short that implicates itself, on a hand-drawn debut that took 18 months of one person's life. The ecosystem rewards that kind of commitment unevenly and unpredictably. But it's more interesting than another desaturated drama about grief.
Watch for Jinsei's IFC Center opening numbers in early June. If a hand-drawn indie anime can hold a screen in New York, the conversation about what theatrical indie animation can be gets a lot more interesting.