This human-vs-nature horror film is a passable watch, but it’s hamstrung by a clichéd father/daughter backstory, characters who make poor decisions just to further the plot, and a total lack of real suspense.

Premise: As a Category 5 hurricane hits their hometown in Florida, college student Haley (Kaya Scodelario) ignores the evacuation order so that she can search for her missing father (Barry Pepper). But after she finds him, injured in their old family home, she is soon hunted by alligators let loose by the rising floodwaters.

Review:

Let’s be honest, there is absolutely no point in comparing any man-versus-nature horror/thriller against Jaws, the all-time high point of that particular sub-genre. But within that sub-genre there have been some really good films – like 1996’s The Ghost and the Darkness (starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas) or 2016’s The Shallows (starring Blake Lively) – as well as some absolute stinkers (like Jaws 4: The Revenge). In truth, Crawl lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, as it’s a passable, if fairly forgettable, 90 minute watch.

The premise is an interesting one, but it’s also one of the film’s biggest limitations. The set-up is that Haley (Kaya Scodelario) and her father (Barry Pepper) find themselves trapped in the crawlspace underneath their Florida home when rising floodwaters allow hungry alligators to get between them and the exit. It’s an intriguingly claustrophobic premise, but after the first 20 minutes or so, it does feel like the writers are struggling to find creative ways for the characters to try (and fail) to escape. The problem is, the premise only works if the writers keep the characters trapped in the crawlspace, but there’s really not much for the characters to do while they’re trapped there – which is perhaps why the writers fall back on the crutch of introducing a series of peripheral characters whose only purpose is to arrive and to then be eaten by the alligators (who clearly can’t eat the lead characters that early in the film).

“…never quite settles on what tone it wants to aim for…”

If you compare the writing in Crawl with, say, the writing in The Shallows, it really highlights just how creative the latter was, as it made Blake Lively’s character’s attempts to survive, stranded within sight of the shore, gripping even when the shark wasn’t around. In comparison, there are sections of Crawl where the characters feel like they’re just treading water until the next alligator sequence, and they fill these spaces by discussing their clichéd father/daughter backstory, which involves him having been her childhood competitive swimming coach. That element of the story also feels really cheesy, and as soon as you learn that Haley is a competitive-level swimmer, you just know that she’s going to have to out-race an alligator at some point. I’m not a zoologist, but I’d be surprised if any (injured) college level swimmer could swim faster than a hunting alligator – and equally, I’d be surprised if some of the injuries that various characters suffer in this film would not have been far more debilitating in real life.

In truth, it feels like Crawl never quite settles on what tone it wants to aim for – is it a serious, gritty thriller, or is it an OTT man-versus-monster romp? Does it want to deliver adrenaline-fueled action and buckets of gore, or is it trying to generate an unnerving sense of dread and suspense? Unfortunately, it never quite seems to decide, and so never fully satisfies on any level.

“…nothing really memorable or gripping about it…”

The cast list is essentially just Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper, both fine actors who both give this film their all. Kaya Scodelario in particular clearly committed to the physicality of the role and is convincing throughout, and as a result, is unquestionably the film’s greatest positive. The film’s problems lie not with the actors, but with the script which requires their characters to make bad decisions in order to further the plot (for example, in one scene Haley tries to use her phone in an area where the alligators could strike at any moment, rather than spending 10 seconds moving back to safety and using it there). It seems that in the best suspense movies, things go wrong due to events outside of the hero’s control (Gravity, The Shallows and A Quiet Place, for example), whereas Crawl often seems to require the leads to make poor decisions to up the ante.

Overall, Crawl is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination … but equally, there’s nothing really memorable or gripping about it either. I wasn’t on the edge of my seat for any of it as the direction doesn’t really generate any suspense, and I wasn’t exhilarated by any of the action scenes either. It wasn’t an unpleasant 90 minutes, but it wasn’t a film that had me particularly engaged either. I know that a lot of horror fans seem to have really enjoyed it, but for me, it was a “watch it once and forget about it” film (and I may go and revisit The Ghost and the Darkness or The Shallows instead next time).