Piranha 3D director Alexandre Aja returns to the water for a lean, suspenseful tale of a father and daughter trapped in a flooding, predator-filled house in the middle of a hurricane.
Yes. So simple, isn’t it?
Crawl sees a young woman stuck in house with an alligator while a hurricane edges closer – an astonishingly premise, yet one played out with a great deal of skill by the Sam Raimi-produced horror film. Part of that is because, well, alligators tend to evoke a great sense of fear. And director Alexandre Aja knows exactly how to rinse the most out of his scaly antagonists. They’re pitted against Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a swimmer driving her way into a disaster zone to track down her father (Barry Pepper), who are the main characters that are trapped in the house with the alligators in the first place is a neat bit of storytelling.
Oh poor, Kaya, she finds her father injured in the crawlspace underneath their old family home. He’s been attacked by an alligator, and now the pair are forced into a battle to leave in one piece, rather than lots of little ones.
Throw the characters into a mostly enclosed, flooding space, introduce some hungry alligators and let things play out from there.
Simple?
Eschewing attempts to make it overly self-aware, it’s a monster movie and never pretends to be anything else, which in fact makes it stands out from the rest of the monster movie playing field.
On the cast front, Scodelario finds reserves of strengths and the odd moment of depth in Haley, while proving that she’s a good fit for the genre. There’s a steely look to her that makes you believe she really has the will to pull through, but who unwittingly seals the fate of five people along the way, while Pepper grits his teeth, making the most of his slightly underwritten and half-eaten character right up to the end of the film.
Oh, and there’s even an adorable pup named Sugar thrown into the mix, in case the film didn’t quite feel sentimental enough.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
Crawl is a rousing return to form for the director, it’s a solid, crowd-pleasing reminder that Aja knows his genre, an 87-minute exercise in pushing and then securing audience members to the very edge of their seats. There’s a good redemption arc in the film, lots of blood, high tension and the alligators look surprisingly CGI good.
4/5 STARS