Director: Xavier Gens
Three years after a research trip off the coast went catastrophically wrong, a marine biologist gets the news she least wants to hear: the shark she thought she'd lost is now circling the Seine, in the middle of Paris.
What is Under Paris about?
Sophia has spent years trying to move past the expedition that cost her a research team and left her convinced a massive predator named Lilith is still out there. When Lilith turns up in the river running through the French capital, days before a major swimming event is set to draw thousands to the water, Sophia is pulled back into the exact situation she'd tried to escape. City officials would rather manage the story than the shark, environmental activists complicate the response with their own agenda, and Sophia finds herself racing against both a ticking clock and people who don't want to hear what she already knows about how the animal behaves. The film uses its landmark setting for maximum irony, turning tourist postcards of the Seine into a hunting ground, while keeping its real interest on a woman forced to relive a trauma she never processed in a city that has no idea what's swimming beneath it.
Cast & crew
Bérénice Bejo plays Sophia with a wariness that grounds the film's bigger set pieces, while Nassim Lyes and Léa Léviant fill out the environmentalist and rescue-diver sides of the story pulled into the crisis alongside her.
Context & significance
Directed by Xavier Gens, the film leans into French genre cinema's recent appetite for high-concept creature features, pairing disaster-movie scale with a Paris backdrop rarely used for this kind of story.
Where & how to watch
Under Paris streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and subtitles, in a Farsi interface built for the Iranian diaspora. Watching requires a free K-Time account login; this page itself is free to read.