CRAWL (Alexandre Aja). 87 minutes. Now playing. See listing. Rating: NNNN
There’s a reason “don’t go in the basement” is one of the most oft-cited rules in horror movies: anything could be down there. A creepy doll. A guy in a hockey mask. Your father, who went downstairs to shore up a leaky wall ahead of an oncoming hurricane. Or the big honking alligator, swept up the drainpipe by flooding, which attacked your dad… and is still there, waiting in the dark.
That’s the setup for Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, a stripped-down survival thriller starring Kaya Scodelario as competitive swimmer Haley, who finds herself trapped with her badly injured father (Barry Pepper) in the basement of their flooding family home by that aforementioned gator.
Water is coming in, the alligator isn’t going out, and that hurricane is bearing down on them, meaning their chances of rescue are getting smaller by the minute. What would you do? What could you do?
A return to merciless-strategist form for producer/director Aja after the atrocious family drama The 9th Life Of Louis Drax, it has everything you want from the genre: decent jump scares, credible peril, a couple of nervous laughs, a fine sense of pacing and one serious gross-out moment – all delivered with expert timing and ruthless efficiency by the man who made High Tension and the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes. He also mixes practical and digital creature effects to create a convincing menace: Crawl’s take on alligators is that they’re blunt objects, not particularly clever but awfully determined.
Scodelario, of the Maze Runner movies and that last Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, carries the whole thing on her back with a complicated, largely silent performance that juggles panic, desperation and resolve – and both she and her director know that monsters are at their scariest not when they’re hidden from us, but when we know exactly where they are.
Recommended to anyone who’s been itching to squirm in the dark for an hour and a half. The air conditioning is an extra bonus.
@normwilner
