3 out of 5

Directed by: Alexandre Aja

A very fun creature feature that hits a breaking point between digital and practical effects: we can whine about the lack of the latter, but the insane setups Crawl conceives would not have been truly possible without the former; unfortunately, even when they’re really, really good – and they are! – time, money, and talent are going to be some limiting factors.

Crawl’s rollout to its premise, which finds Haley (Kaya Scodelario) and father Dave (Barry Pepper) stuck in their flooded Florida home during a hurricane, preyed upon by alligators, is expert work: director Alexandre Aja’s management of shot and script commodity (working off of a tweaked story from Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) to get Haley from swim practice to her family’s dilapidated swampland house, in search of her father, makes their eventual isolation feel very real within the context of the story, and gives us all we need to know about their relationship and personalities through clipped dialogue between Haley and her sister (Morfydd Clark), and Scodelario’s reactions to losing a swim meet at the film’s start. It’s also to Aja’s / the Rasmussens’ credits that this formative stuff doesn’t feel heavy-handed: while it’s inevitable that the movie’s events will affect Haley’s / Dave’s frayed father / daughterness in some way, and that Dave’s possibly overly-aggressive training of Haley’s swimming in her youth will be some Checkov’s gun solve later on, we don’t get the “stare at the camera and restate the meaning” beats; Scodelario and Pepper make the duo’s patter very natural, and Aja manages to give them space between alligator attacks to talk things out at a smooth cadence.

Haley loses her qualifying match; her sister calls to suggest she hunker down during the incoming Category 5 storm, but / and – have you heard from Dad? Against sis’ advice, and in a telling moment of perseverance / definance, Haley drives further and further into the bad weather to find out why Dave isn’t answering his phone. She discovers him in the crawl space of their childhood home; bad news: something else is there with them, and soon enough, the storm has trapped them all together. From there, even at a blissfully tight runtime of 87 minutes, I was surprised how much the movie escalated things, always taking ante-ups one or two antes further than I would have guessed; multiple times I was successfully faked out thinking – okay, this is where we proceed to the ending sequence, or this is where the film transitions to X, only for some other calamity to strike. Tons of fun.

…Unfortunately, that fun was always limited by: digital gators. Again, these looked really good. Texture-wise, the creatures felt like they belonged in the environments, and that those environments were shared with our human actors. In hectic, storm-swept settings, that is no small feat – and it should be added that digital also added backgrounds behind the real in-camera weather effects – real rain, real water – and that stuff blended perfectly. (The very digital, dirty look favored by Aja’s longtime DP Maxime Alexandre works really well when the storms make everything very grey and dirty.) But the creatures lacked weight, and it’s noticeable even from their first appearance. Aja also has a tendency to cut before a moment gets too tense (ironic, given his horror background) which means that we’re not milking the most out of the seconds before the digital baddies burst in, and when they do, the impact is further undersold. This makes the experience of watching Crawl conflicting: your brain is registering how effective the concept is, and, as mentioned, sequences escalate really satisfyingly, and the visuals work, for sure, but they’re lacking those final details to make them really work. It’s fun, and could’ve been funner.

Lastly, this carries over to the performances. Scodelario and Pepper are generally great at the human stuff, and it’s clear they went all-in on the physical work. But those moments when they were hitting foam alligators or whatever stood in for the real thing don’t always sell it: again, the impact of interacting with these things feels slightly off, and Scodelario in some scenes felt like she was more thinking about the choreography than reacting with requisite terror. I’d hold Aja responsible for this overall, which goes back to the time and money limitations – at a $13-15 million budget for an effects-laden film, I’m not sure how many opportunities you have to reshoot.

Still, despite my CG grievances, this wins out over plenty of bigger budgeted affairs, and finds an enjoyable – and rewatchable! – balance between campy creature feature and a more devastating thriller.