Crawl review: Snappy monster horror that doesn’t stint on the gore

Demetrios Matheou23 August 2019

Gators and crocs have always been poor relations to the shark in the hierarchy of natural horror beasties. Maybe it’s because of those dumpy little legs, or snouts that can’t compare for chill value with the fin slicing through water. Or maybe it’s simply the material — whether it’s featuring grizzlies or whales or killer bees, no film will ever equal Jaws. That said, the Florida alligator gets to shine in this preposterous but highly satisfying, edge-of-seat monster movie.

Is it coincidence, or a sign of the times, that Crawl quickly follows 2016’s The Shallows, with which it shares a major characteristic: a young woman who uses her wits as much as mettle to navigate a dire predicament. In the earlier film, Blake Lively was stranded on a buoy as a shark circled; now Kaya Scodelario is hemmed inside the crawl space of a flooding Florida house in the middle of a hurricane, with a gaggle of gnashing gators ordering à la carte.

Scodelario is Haley, a competitive swimmer who’s lost her mojo since her parents separated. With the fearsome storm bearing down on the state, she ignores the evacuation alert to go in search of estranged father Dave (Barry Pepper). She finds him injured beneath his home, where the pair are trapped by both the weather and the escapees from the local alligator farm. Reconciliation and survival become one and the same.

Director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) is a horror specialist with a tendency for excess. He’s not subtle here either, but does understand that the best scares are to be derived from the confined spaces and the threat of the unseen. While the alligator effects are strong, there’s more tension created by a deep-focus shot of a young woman’s face and the grinning predator behind her, and by the “here we go again” sound of a wind-up torch.

At the same time, Aja gleefully embraces the imperative of every horror film — that the dispensable characters have to die horribly so that we understand completely the consequences for the protagonists. He doesn’t stint on the gore.

Scodelario (Skins, Pirates of the Caribbean) and the veteran Pepper make a good father-daughter team, each displaying no-nonsense, unglamourised grit and conviction.

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