It’s a normal summers’ day in Florida….
…what? That’s the film. You’re telling me metre-high cyclone floods and bloodbaths of gator attacks aren’t normal over there? Guess I’ll have to delete some of my notes of Crawl being an excellent documentary then…
One look at the poster and most would flick past Crawl as a typical creature feature with a survivor trying to fight off a mediocre cgi animation that goes nom nom at anyone who walks down a dark cellar while trying to survive the hellish environment alongside a pet that probably has the internet crying for its survival like a ten year old girl. Well I withhold no surprises that Crawl is yet another monster-survival flick with a pet but I do have to say I’m surprised with how well it works for one in an age of half-cocked overly-bloody/sexual are-you-offended-yet monster films. A suspenseful ride with good variety of tense scenarios that does an underplayed concept justice. And snapping. Lots of it.
Pro-swimmer Haley goes searching for her father during a worsening cyclone. After finding him alive but bitten in his cellar, the two get cut off by two hungry gators and have to try and find a way to escape while the water rises. The first thing I admire about this film is its slow build-up. Family chemistry is played up while the apocalyptic shroud of the storm is exploited and made exceptionally frightening long before the first set of green teeth find Haley’s hands rather attractive. But one might suspect a film about alligator infestation in a flood to quickly become dreary after the first few scares, but where Crawl tackles this is its quickly morphing scenarios.
Haley and her father sheltering from gators in a murky cellar swiftly switches to cops and robbers finding themselves getting quickly mauled in floodwater and the way the worsening swarms of gators are revealed is surprisingly suspenseful, even if the characters are somewhat (okay, really) stupid in their decisions and the excess of gore makes the film quite unnatural and silly, but what can you expect from a Hollywood predator film?
While it may not make you step outside with a new fear of a natural preddy like Jaws did, it’s still far more creative with its scares than most horrors today through fear of the unknown and conjured tension from the worsening condition of both the environment and our characters with an increasing onslaught of rain and teeth. But the gators' attitude of wanting to rip off everyone’s faces in an unquenchable bloodlust soon becomes not so threatening once you see Haley get through five 2125-pounds-psi noms of her limbs with a few paper cuts while everyone else gets torn like wet tissue.
But the unique suspense, such as a scene where Haley tries to reel in a bobbing corpse to nab its gun while on a tiny patch of land which happens to be a gator’s nest, is still occasionally nail-biting and the storm’s nature is sometimes even more threatening than the gators, especially towards the climax. Crawl’s performances and communication between our two protagonists, though, is the film’s ultimate working point as a survival. Tense performances by Scodelario and Pepper thankfully don’t fall into the bunker of corny and stale acting that can so easily turn a monster film into a so-bad-it’s-funny failure and keeps you engaged with their vulnerable perspectives almost all times. Just don’t go expecting the majesty of Jaws or anything revolutionarily shakespearean about a gang of gators.