Crawl (2019)

Back in 2010, Christine Coyle Johnson and Julie Prendiville Roux wrote and Carlos Brooks directed Burning Bright, the tale of a young woman (Briana Evigan) trying to protect her autistic young brother (Charlie Tahan) from an escaped tiger that has taken shelter in her home during a hurricane. Almost a decade later Michael and Shawn Rasmussen took the same basic idea (although the publicity claims that it was inspired by a real story from Hurricane Florence – and indeed alligators were seen in worrying numbers roaming the streets of towns in North Carolina in the wake of that storm), replaced the tiger with a pack of aggressive and hungry alligators and Alexandre Aja made a much better job of turning into a stripped-down shocker that clearly has nothing new to say but does it very well indeed.

Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) is a competitive swimmer at the University of Florida, formerly coached by her father Dave (Barry Pepper) from who she’s now largely estranged. Warned by her sister that Dave’s home is in the path of a category 5 hurricane, she goes looking for him, finding him wounded and unconscious in the crawlspace of the house she grew up in and he’s not alone. They and the family dog Sugar are soon trapped in the basement of the house by both rapidly rising flood waters and a growing number of ravenous alligators.

Briskly directed and boasting some outstanding physical and digital effects, Crawl is no genre game-changer but it is a huge amount of fun, Aja deftly overcoming the derivative script’s shortcomings to deliver a taut and occasionally scary chiller. The script is chock full of clumsy writing and coincidences (there’s a flashback to Haley’s childhood where dad refers to her, inexplicably, as an “apex predator” solely to set up a rubbish line later in the film and aren’t we lucky that our heroine is such a strong swimmer?) and it has a habit of padding out the non-alligator bits with scenes of Haley and Dave working through their not-terribly-interesting personal issues.

But Aja stages the alligator attacks with considerable gusto, has no qualms about putting his monsters front and centre (he commendably doesn’t go to ludicrous lengths to keep them hidden to ramp up suspense) and keeps things to a very pleasing 87 minutes, something of a relief at a time when genre films seemed to be getting longer and more unwieldy with every release. There’s the odd clunky moment – he dwells on Haley spotting a discarded screwdriver and we just know that she’ll need it later in the film – but on the whole this is the work of the man who made the brutal Haute tension/Switchblade Romance (2003) and the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Piranha 3D (2010) rather than the more restrained and less effective Mirrors (2008) and Horns (2013).

Scodelario, her natural English accent now all but entirely eradicated, makes for a resourceful and athletic heroine but isn’t quite good enough an actor to actually make us care all that much about the emotionally closed-off Haley. Pepper has a largely thankless role, lying around bleeding and shouting for most of the film. Neither stands a chance against the real stars of the film, Rodeo FX’s impressive alligators, a mix of CGI and practical effects which are truly nasty. Aja and co don’t skimp on their violence, the Rasmussen’s providing enough incidental supporting characters (a pair of looters and a couple of cops) to get messily ripped apart by the gators and give audiences a little respite from the Stygian gloom of the confines of the alligator and rat infested crawlspace.

Claustrophobic, tense and above all else great fun, Crawl is a top notch B movie that makes the most of its limited resources. As is often the case, you think about it too much and it all comes crashing down but as a switch-off-you-brain-and-go-with-it thriller it’s huge amount of fun. You’ll need to get through those tedious family bonding moments (which never really aspire to anything more meaningful than Hallmark TV movie level platitudes and their accompanying stock emotional responses) but thankfully there’s not too many of them. And if nothing else, let’s be grateful for an impressive aquatic-beastie-on-the-loose film that doesn’t involve a bloody shark…