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Date: 7/31/2019
What I’m watching: a superior thriller timed perfectly for summer.
In theaters: Crawl
With all of the attention paid of late to the CGI remake of “The Lion King,” a little film such as “Crawl” doesn’t get the attention it so richly deserves.
That’s too bad because this film is a textbook study for a thriller and how to effectively use a low to medium budget. You may have heard already that “Crawl” deals with people trapped in the crawlspace of a Florida home, but it’s so much more.
Before telling you a bit of the plot, let me just say this film restores the great American alligator to its rightful place as a really scary beast. Thanks to social media we’ve seen photos and videos of alligators in swimming pools or walking through golf courses in the South. These images sort of make them look as benign as an opossum wandering through your back yard.
They are not!
One might forget that ‘gators held a respectable position a while back thanks in part to the “Lake Placid” movies as being a critter who deserves a wide berth and our respect.
In this film Kaya Scodelario plays Halley, a University of Florida swimmer who becomes concerned about her semi-estranged father who isn’t answering his phone. There is a major hurricane hitting the state and she is worried enough to drive into the storm to try to find her father.
She finds Dad (Barry Pepper) in the crawl space of the family home. He has been injured. It seems gators have come into the crawl space as the waters have risen and have been looking for something to eat.
The rest of the film is a race against the floodwaters steadily creeping up while the father and daughter try to find a way out without drowning or being eaten.
Director Alexandre Aja has made several horror films/thrillers including the outrageous “Piranha 3D,” but here he clearly wants an element of believability. The gators are big and hungry and our two main characters are grounded and real.
What I really liked about the film, aside from making me jump and swear out loud about every 10 minutes, is the fact the film is centered about a relationship between father and daughter. There is a human dramatic core that is frequently missing in a film such as this one.
I genuinely cared about these two characters and the two lead actors should be saluted for performances that are either largely in mud or in water. It couldn’t have been easy.
The film is constructed in such a way that one plateau of action and suspense is simply the gateway for a higher plateau of frights. By the time the film ended I was exhausted.
Now this film is rated R for a reason. It’s about alligators eating people and while that action is handled in a non-exploitive way, there are plenty of little moments that are shocking.
If I were still teaching a film class as I did for many years at Western New England University, I would be showing this film as an example of how to create tension and suspense.
Try to catch it in a theater with an audience. I think you’ll see the film plays very well in that environment.