'Playing With Sharks': Film Review | Sundance 2021
There's a key contrast early on that distills the fascination of Playing With Sharks, Sally Aitken's enthralling documentary about underwater adventurer Valerie Taylor. Richard Dreyfuss, in a line from Jaws, is heard saying, "What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine." Then a plummy British voice that appears to be a young David Attenborough chimes in: "Monsters like these came to dominate the sea some 350 million years ago." Cut to the octogenarian Taylor, cheerfully packing her pink wetsuit for a trip to Fiji to dive in waters teeming with bull sharks that would send most swimmers scrambling for the shore in terror.