Crawl lends credence to the claim that you should never give up on a director. This is the most satisfying (read: least sadistic) horror flick from French filmmaker Alexandre Aja that I’ve seen. (High Tension, 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, and Piranha 3D are the others.) The setup is simple: Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a collegiate swimmer, is trapped with her father (Barry Pepper) during a hurricane in their Florida home. As the water rises, so does the number of ravenous, invasive alligators. The script by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen force-feeds more family psychology than is probably necessary, including flashbacks to Haley’s youth, when her father was her swim coach and had a habit of calling her an “apex predator.” More entertaining is Aja’s witty imagery. I love how a tire swing, with its scale-like treads, swings into the frame before we even see our first gator. Jaws-like visual teases follow, including a shot of a scaly tail brushing against a pipe in the house’s crawlspace, sounding like someone is rubbing their thumb against a giant comb. The coup de grace is probably a double profile shot, in which a gator slips into the foreground of the frame, its jaws opening wide, through which we can see a terrified Haley in the background. Crawl co-stars Cso-cso the dog as Sugar, the family pet, and it’s a sign that this is a kinder, gentler Aja that (spoiler alert) little Sugar survives against all odds.
(3/5/2022)
