Crawl is a natural horror movie directed by Alexandre Aja and starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, and a bunch of CGI alligators.
A Cat-5 hurricane is bearing down on Florida and Haley (Scodelario) has just finished a swim practice. Her sister (Morfydd Clark) calls her and asks her to check in on their father Dave (Pepper), who has dropped out of contact. Haley goes out to their old house and finds that her father is trapped in the rapidly-flooding basement with a couple of goddamn huge alligators, injured, and with no way to call for help.
The rest of the movie is Haley and Dave (and their heroic dog, Sugar, who does survive the movie) trying to get clear of the gators and get out of the area before the levees break. The gators eat a group of looters and a couple of cops, and they bite the shit out of our heroes (Dave loses an arm), but the protagonists survive and our closing shot is Haley triumphantly holding a flare up to signal an incoming helicopter.
I love natural horror movies, and I've been getting into them more the last couple of years. I don't know, there's something satisfying and scary about the natural world exerting itself in the face of humanity's relentless attempts to kill it, and one of the biggest themes of natural horror is that we can't control the world, and any attempts to do so inevitably have knock-on effects that wind up coming back to bite us (literally, in this case). A lot of natural horror, though, includes a human antagonist that makes the situation worse, generally by ignoring the facts to pursue money (the mayor in Jaws springs readily to mind). Crawl doesn't have that - the only antagonists are the gators and the weather, and the only goal is survival. Sure, Haley and her dad have some hard conversations about Dave's divorce, Haley's swim career, and their family home, but then the movie actually lets them survive, so those moments don't feel wasted.
The movie is simple, tense, and gory in places, but it's well done and I'm glad to see a solid creature feature.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: High
Next up: Jojo Rabbit
No comments:
Post a Comment