Creature Feature: Crawl
Kaya Scodelario plays an intense game of "the floor is lava" in Crawl.
Resolve your childhood daddy issues or an alligator will eat you.
What’s Crawl About?
As a hurricane bears down on Florida, collegiate competitive swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) is making plans to leave the state. But when her sister calls and says she hasn’t heard from their estranged father (Barry Pepper), Haley’s plans change.
Now, she’s driving into the storm in search of her father, who’s not picking up his phone.
Though Haley and her dad were close — he was her swimming coach before college — they grew apart after a divorce broke up the family. She hasn’t talked to him in months and he stopped showing up to her meets. Still, when she finds her father injured beneath the crawlspace of the old family home, Haley is concerned about finding help in a mandatory evacuation area.
She’s more concerned when a giant alligator bursts through the steps and tries to eat her. Trapped in a basement with her father and an alligator, Haley must improvise, adapt, or be eaten.
Is the Creature Cool?
Mostly done with computer graphics, the alligators in Crawl look pretty good due to low lighting and some creative shots. Director Alexandre Aja chose to use Computer Generated effects because he worried that animatronics would make the alligators look too stiff. But to avoid having the alligators look too flat on screen, Aja combined practical effects with the CG alligators. This means that divers created wakes in the water that animators could later add realistic-looking alligators to. The marriage of practical set effects and CG creatures made the alligators look as though they belonged in the world, giving them weight and strength as they charged through scenes.
Think of the techniques Robert Zemeckis used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, only in this film Roger would be attempting to eat someone.
What Makes Crawl Good?
Crawl is exactly the movie you think it is. Short, bloody, and viscerally exciting, this sleek 87-minute film is a great example of keeping things simple and understanding what the audience wants. Aja doesn’t convolute the plot: It’s a movie about a father and daughter fighting an alligator in their crawlspace.
The movie peppers in enough backstory to allow audiences to understand these two characters, why they have conflict, and how they resolve their issues. It’s a lean, but effective script.
Aja also builds great tension as Haley tries to figure out how to get out of the basement. She has to creep around in the dark, conscious that a giant reptile is also lurking somewhere in the shadows, hoping to snap her up. Haley’s swimming skills come into play, but so does her own stubbornness and resilience.
Scodelario and Pepper have great chemistry. You can see the pain between them, and how similar they are in personality. As they try to figure out how to defeat the gator, they finally have to work together and through their issues.
Who knew gators were so skilled at family therapy?
Verdict
If you’re a fan of Jaws-type creature horror, this is a fun spin on the genre.
Crawl is rated R and is available to rent/buy on VOD.
