‘Crawl’ Review

I’ll be honest. When I first saw the Crawl trailers, I had zero interest in seeing it. I thought it looked dumb and gimmicky. And then the reviews started coming in. And they were almost unanimously positive. It started with a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. That has since fallen, but only to 85% critic/78% audience. And as imperfect and flawed as Rotten Tomatoes is, I still couldn’t help but take notice. I figured I might as well give Crawl a shot. And oh man, it blew my expectations out of the water.

Crawl’s plot is very basic. In the midst of Category 5 hurricane, college student Haley (Kaya Scodelario) goes to check on her father Dave (Barry Pepper). When she finds him, he’s passed out after being attacked by an alligator who found its way into the house. Trapped in a flooding basement, the two must work together to survive against the increasing threat of both the weather and multiple alligators.

And what ultimately makes Crawl work as well as it does is its ability to stay within that simpler, more grounded setting (its tight 87 minute runtime certainly doesn’t hurt, either). There aren’t any genetically enhanced monsters to deal with. There’s no in-fighting between the main (only, really) characters. It’s just a father and daughter against natural elements and your regular, everyday alligators.

Yes, you still need to suspend your disbelief to a degree. In particular, the ease with which Haley and Dave shake off multiple alligator attacks is laughable. And this type of movie lends itself to the corny side of film, and there are definitely corny moments. But the movie is so self-aware, and never tries to be something it’s not, that all this is pretty easily forgivable.

Director Alexandre Aja also shows a deft hand at building suspense without an over-reliance on jump scares. He uses a number of shots that feel like they’re from an alligator’s perspective. He’s priming the audience for an attack or sudden gator appearance. But he varies the payoff perfectly, so you never know what’s coming. Sometimes you do get an alligator jump scare, sometimes you get a gator appearing from somewhere else in the shot, and still other times there’s nothing. This was one of the best surprises, as you can usually bank on these kinds of movies beating you over the head with cheap jump scares.

Now don’t get me wrong, Crawl is far from a perfect movie. I already briefly touched on the alligator attacks. And while it’s ridiculous, at least the movie is consistent. It’s not like the attacks are seriously hurting them, and then when the plot needs Haley to overcome the pain, she’s able to. That’s how you might expect a movie like this to handle that aspect. So credit given where credit due. Probably the biggest issue comes with the limited space in which the movie takes place.

Given that the bulk of the movie takes place in a flooding house, there are only so many actions the characters are physically able to make. Because of that, it does lag just a little bit in the middle. It begins to feel just slightly repetitive. It starts off nice and fast, slows down just a little too much, before ramping back up for the third act. In addition to that, the human drama leaves something to be desired. There’s enough there to keep you emotionally invested in Haley and Dave’s fates, but it’s not much more than surface level development.

In what has been a mostly underwhelming summer slate, Crawl is a definite breath of fresh air as we wait for the upcoming rush of Oscar hopefuls.  For what looked like an absolute joke of a movie, Crawl not only met expectations, but smashed them to smithereens. It’s not often that I find myself recommending this kind of movie, but outside of the big studio blockbusters (Spider-Man, Toy Story 4, etc). Crawl is as good as anything in theaters right now.

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Matt Hambidge