By 1996, Jaws had long since escaped the confines of New Hollywood and become a migratory genre organism, washing up on shores far beyond Amity Island. Aatank, directed by Prem Lalwani, is one of the more fascinating examples of this cinematic drift—an Indian coastal thriller that doesn’t merely borrow Spielberg’s template, but absorbs it wholesale, then filters it through the melodramatic, musical, and moral frameworks of Bollywood cinema.

The influence is impossible to miss. A man-eating shark terrorises a fishing community. Authority figures falter. Economic greed disturbs the natural order. Loved ones vanish beneath deceptively calm waters. Lalwani stages his set-pieces with a clear awareness of Jaws’ grammar: delayed revelation, ominous underwater POVs, and a mounting sense that the sea itself has turned hostile. Even the shark—“gigantic” and virtually indestructible—feels less like an animal than a force of narrative punishment.

Where Aatank diverges is in its cultural emphasis. Spielberg’s film is a parable about civic denial and institutional paralysis; Lalwani’s is rooted in class struggle, corruption, and exploitation. Alphonso, the gangster figure disturbing the ocean for black pearls, is as much the villain as the shark itself. The monster becomes an extension of human greed—a folkloric retribution rather than a random act of nature. This moral framing aligns Aatank more closely with Bollywood’s tradition of cosmic justice than Hollywood’s man-vs-nature spectacle.

Tonally, the film oscillates between romance, tragedy, and creature feature with little concern for restraint. Musical interludes and heightened emotion sit uneasily beside severed limbs and marine terror, yet this collision is precisely what makes Aatank compelling as a global genre artefact. It is not subtle, nor especially polished, but it is sincere in its ambition to localise a Western horror touchstone within Indian popular cinema.

The Prognosis:

Aatank stands as a reminder that Jaws did not merely create a subgenre—it became a cinematic language spoken worldwide, even when the accent was unmistakably regional. Rough around the edges and deeply derivative, yes, but also culturally revealing, Aatank is less a knock-off than a translation—one where the shark swims through distinctly Indian waters.

• Saul Muerte