An aquatic survival thriller that tries to tick off 3 genres as once and fails at them all keeps its head above water as one of Netflix’s biggest hits

Trying to fold several different genres into a single feature can often make or break the movie in question, although failing on all fronts hasn’t done a thing to stop this year’s unheralded Deep Fear from becoming an unexpectedly massive hit on Netflix.

Per FlixPatrol, the aquatic adventure can currently be found as the seventh most-watched title on the global charts after swimming its way onto the Top 10 in 25 countries worldwide, even if a 20 percent audience approval score on Rotten Tomatoes highlights that the majority of the people to have seen it aren’t entirely won over by what they found.

Madaline Ghenea and Ed Westwick head up the ensemble as an around-the-world yachtswoman and her boyfriend who run headlong into danger when a storm knocks her vessel off-course. Doing her civic duty and investigating a distress call, it turns out a trio of shipwreck survivors are actually drug traffickers who ended up suffering a misfortune of their own when their boat hit a snag.

Oh, did we mention the sharks? Because there are sharks too, with our intrepid protagonist forced against her will to dive down to a sunken wreck in order to retrieve almost a ton of cocaine, all while hungry predators circle what they’d love nothing more than to make their latest meal.

Part survival story, part shark attack horror, and part drug-running thriller, Deep Fear may have fell short on all three counts, but you can’t take away its status as one of the biggest hits on the biggest streaming service.