Crawl

Release Date: July 12, 2019
Runtime: 87 minutes
Rating: R
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director: Alexandre Aja
Cast: Kaya Scodelario; Barry Pepper; Morfydd Clark; Ross Anderson

On the title alone, a person wouldn’t be blamed for thinking Crawl might be the story of a particularly nasty infestation of caterpillars or possibly even the heartwarming tale of a baby’s first steps. Alas, since the poster prominently features the gaping, pointy jaws of a crocodile in the foreground and a young woman perched defensively atop a capsized boat in what looks like a standard living room in the background, one can safely assume Crawl to be exactly as advertised: a B-movie chomper from genre maestro Alexandre Aja.

My auteurist inclinations compel my admiration of Aja. Here is a guy who burst onto the international horror scene with his terrific French frightener, High Tension, which enjoyed the kind of acclaim that concurrently released horror pics Wrong Turn and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake would have killed for (pardon the pun). Aja has been almost exclusively at the helm of B-horror or creeper pieces (The Hills Have Eyes remake, Mirrors, Piranha 3D, and the Danielle Radcliffe starrer, Horns). The director appears to be most at home in unpretentious, unassuming scaretaculars that don’t require much more of their audience than to have a good time; maybe chuckle a little, maybe grab the armrest as their heart giddily skips a beat. Aja’s efficient modus operandi involves getting the audience into the theater, scared, grossed out, and out of the theater in less than two hours.

Crawl really doesn’t need any plot analysis other than this: father-daughter menaced by hungry crocs during a hellish Florida hurricane. You’re not here for the story, you’re here for the feeding, and Aja doesn’t disappoint on that gory front. Yet the script by brother team Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is smart enough to know that in order to craft an effective horror movie, the story needs to have well (or at least, decently) defined characters with a tangible relationship to one another. Focusing the movie solely on plucky college swimmer Hailey (Kaya Scodelario) and her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), allows the movie to remain focused and the story, tight. Crawl is nothing if not a lean, mean, underwater snapping machine. In this day and age where every single studio-released movie is either a superhero origin story or sequel or conflation of characters from the same “universe,” Aja’s summertime offering is a refreshing piece of genre cinema well worth the price of admission.