Women have long been a staple of the ‘monster in the dark’ horror genre, and for good reason. They are the embodiment of a perceived vulnerability that when swung around into immense power is all the more satisfying. And it’s this appeal, beyond the often over-sexualized flare of decades past that make most of the more successful films in the genre memorable. Jamie Lee Curtis from the original Halloween isn’t just remembered above so many others because the movie is all the good (which it is), it’s because she plays a woman who is the very definition of this pendulum swing. It’s the standard by which so many have copied.
With director Alexandre Aja‘s 2019 thriller Crawl, all the parts and pieces of such a movie are there, and like so many that have all they need, filmmakers goof it up by deciding to add more to it, overburdening it with way too much stuff that weakens the impact rather than strengthening it. I’ll get to that, but here’s the story and in the brief summary you’ll already get sense at what I’m talking about.
We meet Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario), a talented but as thus unsuccessful competitive swimmer. At the end of a swim meet, warnings of a Category 5 hurricane dominate the news and whole areas of Florida are being evacuated. Worried about her father (Barry Pepper), she disobeys police directions and rushes to his home, only to find him trapped in the large crawlspace already attacked by a massive alligator. And it’s not alone, as she soon discovers, several more making their way inland as the storm approaches. Now cornered and with the nowhere to go but up as the place fills with beasts and water, it’s a fight for survival, made all the more threatening by the levee that’s surely about to burst.
With a small cast and a solid set of ingredients, Aja does a lot right with writer’s Shawn and Michael Rasmussen‘s script. It’s simple, easy to follow and is fast-paced, as it should be. Also, the storm effects and constant flood of water is always believable and itself a decent stress, so much so you almost don’t need the animals. In fact, the alligators themselves, of which there are many, oversaturate the whole film, made like demons rather than actual Earthly creatures. For me, the film would have worked far better if only one regular alligator had become trapped, like the humans, in the crawlspace and been a less visible antagonist looming in the dark while they tried to escape the water.
Either way, add to that the impending levee and a silly amount of terrifying attacks that don’t seem to have any actual physical effect on our leading lady, and it becomes bogged down by nonsense rather than the real emotional weight it should.
Still, what works about all this is the character of Haley. Scodelario is more than perfectly cast, she is the life blood from the very beginning, with Aja doing a sensational job of character introduction in an opening that is free of dialogue as the camera carefully moves about a swimming pool full of women in competition, all in the same dark one piece, hair hidden under swim caps, leaving us not really connecting to any of them. We know what it is happening of course but the context of it doesn’t matter. What does is Haley, and once we come upon her, with only subtle looks and and moves of the camera, we fully understand her situation. It’s smart and deeply effective.
By the time we get to Scodelario out of the water and on dry land, which isn’t for long, we’re already invested in where she goes next, and it is because of Scodelario’s restrained yet energetic performance that Crawl ultimately wins the day. She is no scream queen (but does scream), never spending a moment of this leaving us feeling she isn’t capable, even as this becomes the central conceit of the story. I was truly taken in by how well Scodelario finds ways to keep us convinced she is bundled with great ability but bound by a lack of confidence, voiced by her battered and bitten father who now needs her to survive.
The story throws everything at Haley, and in lesser hand perhaps, this would have come across as more ridiculous than it is, but it because of Scodelario that even as the eye-rolling moments pile upon each other, I remained fully entrenched in what would happen next. This is because Haley is a smart character, but not one that isn’t identifiable, she reacts in the moment and makes choices that are hard and sometimes incorrect, but finding ways to get the best out of it. While the script mishandles the attacks on her, with Haley actually in the jaws of alligators three times and left with barely a scratch that slows her progress, these are less important than the transformation we see in her by the end.
Movies like this are mostly symbolic, and Crawl, including its title, are blunt hammer strikes in that department, so a change in Haley isn’t all that unexpected, but what great work Scodelario does in convincing us that it’s real. I love this actor’s face, the way her eyes widen and the way I fell instantly into the emotional conflicts she faced throughout, from the slightest yet heavy hint of insecurity at a pool’s edge to a devastating surge of empowerment in a tidal pool invested by giant teeth. It’s every reason to watch.