Levinson has always been acutely interested in the minutiae of human behaviour, and it's this concern that makes The Bay the triumph that it is.

This astonishingly effective environmental nightmare is based on reasoning that, if you've been following the science, seems all too possible.

The result is surprisingly satisfying, like "Jaws" for the YouTube/Skype era.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

Best of all, I applaud the director's triumph of intimate terror over preposterous puppets and noisy computer-generated effects. In The Bay, the mayhem is both fresh and thrilling.

Levinson is interested in humanity, in the small moments that make us who we are, and it's these moments that make The Bay so chilling.

The Bay manages to scare up a real fear of environmental neglect. It's quite possibly the first example of jump scares used in service of activism.

Despite a handful of legit creepy moments, the film's concern with superficial realism prevents it from really hitting home; its fuzzy, fractured depiction of disaster never comes close to conjuring the "holy shit it could happen here don't touch that doorknob" real-world paranoia of last year's artfully Hollywood-ized disaster film, "Contagion."

The Bay is Barry Levinson's most engaged and entertaining movie since "Wag the Dog," which isn't to say that he's given up his irksome predilection for a certain bullish type of liberalism.

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.