Barry Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of Rain Man and Bugsy, re-emerges with his first film in what feels like a decade, and it’s a found-footage style horror movie about a mysterious bacteria that devours the residents of a sleepy Maryland fishing community – from the inside out! Cobbled together from news reports, on-board police cameras and civilians’ own recordings, a young female journalist (Kether Donohue) pieces together what happened 3 years after the fact, along with ocenaographers’ reports and surgeons’ own reports. She unveils not only a local enivronmental disaster but also a larger cover-up plot as her hometown falls to pieces during the course of one July 4th weekend.

The Bay is unlike anything else that I have seen from Levinson, but he does a pretty effective job of building intrigue and tension, wringing naturalistic performances from his cast of largely unfamiliar faces, and even producing a few decent jump scares and a number of grisly gore sequences. THe final act is somewhat anticlimactic, but it always pleases me to see veteran filmmakers continue to make interesting films in inventive new ways.