★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Jaume Collet-Serra takes a break from Liam Neeson action
vehicles to bring us this astonishingly exciting survival thriller. Medical
student Nancy (Blake Lively) journeys to a mysterious but beautiful bay
of great family significance, but when she enters the feeding grounds of a
great white shark she is quickly marooned on an island barely larger than
herself, severely injured. Nancy’s only companion as the elements close in
around her and the water turns red is a lone injured bird, whom she
affectionately renames Steven Seagull (honestly my favourite to win every
single Best Supporting Actor accolade next year). Are we sure this comes from the
same director who gave us such a dire triptych as Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All
Night?
Lively – with the entire weight of the film resting solely
on her shoulders – is simply excellent. Nancy is totally believable and utterly
sympathetic; one of the few characters to emerge from 2016’s summer blockbuster
season you will actually root for. With such a diverse range of projects in the
past year alone as century-spanning melodrama The Age of Adaline, Woody Allen’s high-class comedy Café Society and now The Shallows, she’s slowly but surely
becoming a force to be reckoned with. It’s certainly tempting to subtitle the
film Blake Lively versus Shark, but
this is misleading. Even when Nancy is removed from the hunting ground, she is
forced to contend with stinging coral, clouds of jellyfish and the mercilessly
methodical tides: there’s a reason it’s called The Shallows.
Obviously, there’s no getting away from comparisons to Jaws (still the ne plus ultra of shark movies),
and the makers of The Shallows have
taken on board the best possible lesson from the 1975 classic. Hiding the shark
as much as possible (though caused by a well-documented series of technical mishaps)
created an aura of faceless terror, of an enemy unseen. Transplanted into the
contemporary era of CGI and enhanced practical effects, the shark is a more
realistic creature, but it is still only revealed in short flashes. A
two-second shot of a fin gliding through the water towards our oblivious
heroine is one of the scariest moments. The entire film can even be understood
as the original Jaws one-sheet turned
on its head: what if that terrified woman turned from helpless victim to wily
survivor?
But besides this twist on the Spielbergian setup, The Shallows compares much more
favourably to Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity:
a lone woman (more specifically, a medical practitioner) is cast adrift in an
unforgiving void-like environment with only her wit and will to survive, any
hope of rescue dwindling hour-by-hour. Much like Gravity, Serra’s film takes occasional pause to marvel at the
natural beauty of its protagonist’s surroundings before bringing her back to
Earth with a heavy splash. Marco Beltrami’s score contains a whisper of Steven
Price, and Flavio Labiano’s camerawork boasts the same floating allure of
Lubezki, but the primary colours are turned up to eleven.
While this doesn’t transcend its humble B-movie roots in the
same way as Cuaron’s smash-hit did, there’s no need for Serra to prove his
worth in a jaw-dropping awards run, either. In a market where shark attack movies
are the default setting for schlocky, straight-to-DVD trash, how fantastic it
is to have something as genuinely unique, visceral and cinematic as The Shallows.
