Crawl

If you are the kind of per­son who, upon hear­ing that Crawl is about a daugh­ter trapped with her grave­ly injured father and giant aggres­sive alli­ga­tors in a house’s base­ment crawl­space dur­ing a Cat­e­go­ry Five hur­ri­cane, can bare­ly sti­fle a yawn, then it is prob­a­bly fair to say that this lat­est film from genre maître Alexan­dre Aja (Piran­ha 3D, Horns) is not for you.

Crawl is, exact­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly, what it is: a high-ten­sion claus­tro­pho­bic thriller that keeps rais­ing its own crea­ture-fea­ture stakes, and repeat­ed­ly snatch­es its human heroes (and their pet dog) from the jaws of defeat only to place them in the path of yet more croc­o­dil­ian cri­sis. So if you don’t want to gasp and groan and wince and jump your way through all the pain and ter­ror, and to feel the frus­tra­tion of ris­ing waters, cir­cling rep­tiles and snap­ping teeth – then caveat emp­tor. The rest of us will be just fine with it.

There is some sub­text lurk­ing just beneath the film’s taut genre sur­face, as the meat on its com­pound-frac­tured bones. Even though she has been raised by her father and for­mer swim­ming coach Dave Keller (Bar­ry Pep­per) to think of her­self as an ​‘apex preda­tor’, stu­dent Haley (Kaya Scode­lario) has of late been under­per­form­ing in her uni­ver­si­ty meets, and risks los­ing her schol­ar­ship. It is just one symp­tom of the Keller family’s disintegration.

Both Haley and her sis­ter Beth (Mory­fy­dd Clark) have flown the coop, and Dave’s wife has left him for anoth­er man. So when Haley comes look­ing for her father, miss­ing in the mid­dle of a dan­ger­ous storm, she is also return­ing to her fam­i­ly home, only to watch it being, both lit­er­al­ly and sym­bol­i­cal­ly, torn asunder.

The ordeal that she shares with her father may be giv­en a mon­strous form (or two, or twen­ty), but it also rep­re­sents this pair’s attempt to rene­go­ti­ate their rela­tion­ship when its very foun­da­tions are under threat. The Kellers (from the Ger­man for ​‘cel­lar’, where they spend most of the film) may be suf­fer­ing trau­ma, and may be in ter­ri­ble jeop­ardy – but they are deter­mined to keep their heads above water, even if a new fam­i­ly has already nest­ed in their for­mer, now frag­ment­ing home.

Crawl falls into that small cat­e­go­ry of high-con­cept films that sees humans caught in close quar­ters with preda­to­ry ani­mals: the tiger in the house from Car­los Brooks’ Burn­ing Bright, the killer sharks in the flood­ed shop­ping mall from Kim­ble Rendall’s Bait 3D, and even the tiger on the lifeboat from Ang Lee’s Life of Pi.

Noth­ing quite expos­es humanity’s extreme lim­its like a hun­gry beast, and these alli­ga­tors, show­ing far less timid­i­ty towards humans than the real thing, embody and reify this daugh­ter and father’s sense of belea­guer­ment and their desire to over­come – and rise above – what is dri­ving them apart. It helps that they are also ter­ri­fy­ing, toothy avatars of death for whom every inci­den­tal char­ac­ter makes bloody easy prey.