"This is your origin story. You gonna be the good guy, or the bad guy?"
Sergeant Keller
Low Tide is a 2019 drama-thriller film starring Jaeden Martell, Kristine Froseth, and Shea Whigham. Four teenaged friends and petty criminals living on the Jersey Shore find themselves falling out, with dangerous consequences, due to the presence of a new girlfriend, secrets involving hidden money and a betrayal of The Stool Pigeon variety.
Tropes:
- Auto Erotica: Alan and Mary have an intimate moment in his car on a rainy day.
- Bittersweet Ending:
- Alan and Peter kill Red when he tries to kill them. They dump his body in the ocean and still have the gold coins, while Mary convinces her family not to press charges against them over the burglary. However, Peter is traumatized from killing Red, Alan's relationship with Mary has probably been destroyed after he's tricked into robbing her house, and the brothers may have a hard time avoiding police suspicion.
- Smitty also avoids being killed or arrested and there are hints he may turn over a new leaf in the last scene, but they may be empty.
- Chekhov's Gun: Peter trades the Cuban cigars from the heist for a boat ride back home after the robbery. Later, Red sees one of the sailors smoking one of the cigars and realizes that Alan and Peter are lying about having lost the loot.
- Evil Cripple: Smitty isn't as bad as Red, but he repeatedly rats out, sets up, or blackmails his friends with little remorse, and he spends almost all of the film with his leg in a cast.
- Hate Sink: Red is an Ax-Crazy jerk who threatens his friends regularly, nearly killed someone for dating his ex-girlfriend in the past, almost stabs someone for playing music he doesn't like, and callously abandons the young Peter during a robbery attempt gone wrong. As the film progresses, he only gets worse.
- One Phone Call: After being arrested for burglary, Peter uses his phone call to contact Don Davis, the pawnshop owner he and his brother have been using to fence gold coins, and offers to sell him more of them in exchange to obtain bail money.
- Parental Abandonment: Alan and Peter's father leaves them to live on their own and only occasionally comes by.
- Playing Both Sides: Alan accuses Smitty of playing both sides, almost word for word. Smitty ratted Red out to the cops to stay out of jail but continues to suck up to Red whenever it will advantage him.
- Scoundrel Code: The kids only rob the houses of wealthy out-of-town tourists and are reluctant to break into a dead local's house at first.
- Suspicious Spending: Peter knows how bad of an idea spending stolen money straight away is (despite only having ever committed one crime) and insists on hanging on to the money until the end of the summer. Alan ignores him and uses several gold coins to buy a new car, with predictably bad results. Ironically, initially the spending attracts the wrong kind of suspicion and make Red assume that Alan is a police informant.
- Was It All a Lie?: When her boyfriend Alan is caught robbing her house-which he didn't know was hers-Mary demands to know whether their whole relationship was just him and his friends scoping out her place.
- Wham Shot: When Red persuades Alan, Peter, and Smitty to do One Last Job, they start robbing the house and then Alan sees a picture of his girlfriend Mary and realizes Red tricked them into robbing her house as an act of spite. And then the cops arrive, having been tipped off by Red.
- "X" Marks the Spot: Peter buries the gold coins under a tree he carves an X into. Later, he moves them, burying them in the surf with an anchor as a marker.
