The Shal­lows

For a cer­tain sub­set of film crit­ics, the Cata­lan-born Jaume Col­let-Ser­ra – direc­tor of such nifti­er-than-pre­dict­ed genre fare as Orphan and Non-Stop – is some­thing of a (fig­u­ra­tive) great white hope. The Shal­lows, which is a movie lit­er­al­ly about a Great White and hope, ful­ly vin­di­cates his cheer­ing sec­tion and at the same time, dis­ap­points on a deep­er lev­el. It’s just good enough that you only wish it was better.

Collet-Serra’s great strength has always been his abil­i­ty to smug­gle an ele­ment of expres­sion­ism into his films’ visu­al envi­ron­ments: the melt­ing home­stead at the cli­max of 2005’s House of Wax and the bombed-out hotel in 2011’s Unknown describe real­i­ties vio­lent­ly dis­solv­ing in real time. The blue, crys­talline ocean back­drop of The Shal­lows is his most beau­ti­ful­ly sug­ges­tive onscreen space yet, a seclud­ed stretch of Mex­i­can beach framed by rocky peaks that look from the shore like the pro­file of a reclin­ing, preg­nant moun­tain goddess.

Or at least, that’s the ver­dict of Nan­cy (Blake Live­ly), who’s come here to surf the same waters as her late moth­er 25 years ear­li­er and also, as revealed dur­ing a phone con­ver­sa­tion with her fam­i­ly, to run away from a life that’s unex­pect­ed­ly get­ting away from her, choice-by-choice. ​“How will you get back?” asks the local man (Oscar Jae­na­da) who’s dri­ven her there. When Nan­cy replies, ​“Uber,” it’s a fun­ny line steeped in grim­ly iron­ic por­tent. We know she’s going to be there for a while.

In a per­fect world, posters and trail­ers wouldn’t have spoiled the set-up and basic sce­nario of The Shal­lows, which is that Nan­cy ends up hud­dled and bleed­ing on a small out­crop­ping two hun­dred yards from shore – the feed­ing ground of a mas­sive shark. The way that Col­let-Ser­ra shifts our per­cep­tion of his set­ting from par­adise to pur­ga­to­ry is impres­sive, with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Flavio Labi­ano tog­gling from sun­blind day­time to greyscale dusk and back again as Nancy’s ordeal drags on. The camera’s fleet, weight­less move­ment above, below and through the water, com­bined with some ini­tial­ly pho­to­re­al­is­tic spe­cial effects, hints at a tru­ly ruth­less thriller blend­ing the authen­tic with the abstract. What fol­lows, though, is less ele­gant­ly inte­grat­ed than that. To use a high­ly sub­jec­tive term, the sec­ond half of The Shal­lows is: cheesy.

And cheesy is no bad thing. Even if we lim­it our exam­ples to mod­ern movies fea­tur­ing killer sharks, Ren­ny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea and David R Ellis’ Shark Night 3D owned the phoni­ness of their spe­cial effects and had fun wring­ing vari­a­tions on the basic stalk-and-swim visu­al lan­guage of Jaws. What hurts The Shal­lows is that Col­let-Ser­ra, whose real mod­el here is the Nature-as-cru­cible manoeu­vres of Grav­i­ty, wants to have his sto­ic, real­is­ti­cal­ly resource­ful hero­ine and eat her too. The affect­ing metaphor­i­cal impli­ca­tions of the sur­vival nar­ra­tive dis­si­pate as Nancy’s bat­tle with the mon­ster grows more and more cartoonish.

There is enter­tain­ing spec­ta­cle here, but while it’s super­fi­cial­ly true that we haven’t seen it all before – Spiel­berg might appre­ci­ate the way Nan­cy uses a buoy as a de fac­to shark cage – there’s a nag­ging sense of a movie duti­ful­ly hit­ting its marks, even if they’ve been skil­ful­ly hid­den beneath the waves.