The Shallows concerns medical student Nancy (Blake Lively), who is in Mexico to travel to a remote beach that her recently passed mother once visited. She’s there on a trip of self-discovery, taking a break from school in order to deal with her grief. She spends a good long day surfing and enjoying herself, but her enjoyment is cut off when she encounters a vicious shark in the water. She is bitten on her leg, and is soon stranded right in the middle of the shark’s feeding grounds. Alone out on the water, on a rock that will eventually be consumed by the tide, Nancy is forced to resort to desperate means to save her own life.
At under ninety minutes, and with such a simple premise, The Shallows is a pretty lean film. And yet, it feels like it could be leaner. The film bogs itself down a bit with a brush with unnecessary backstory. It actually a little bit for the film to really establish its danger, the movie weirdly burdening itself with giving its main character a reason to want to keep surviving. And when the film actually gets to the business of survival, it mostly stays in neutral before suddenly barreling into an unsatisfying endgame.
The first act is basically a lot of extraneous information. The fact that Nancy is grieving her mom doesn’t really come into play later on in the film. It seems pretty silly to have to try and come up with emotional grounding for something as primal as a person trying to stay alive when faced with such an imminent threat. A film like this tends to benefit from being as taut as possible: from limiting the information so that the survival aspect comes into deeper focus.
To some extent, the film does seem to recognize this. Once it gets going, it takes stock of the very limited resources on hand. There is a rock with stinging coral underneath, a broken surfboard floating off nearby, and a buoy that might be just a little too far to get to. Nancy has her skin suit, a digital watch, some jewelry, and the ankle strap to her board. The film works best when it works within these limitations, showing off the natural ingenuity of this character. But it isn’t always able to do that. The film stalls for time in the second act by basically throwing victims to the shark. And the resolution to this whole thing doesn’t really come from an organic place.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra does a lot to keep the film visually engaging. He even manages to make a character doing things on a phone look a bit more interesting than usual. The shark is a digital effect, which is kind of disappointing. As visuals effects go, it looks all right, but it just doesn’t feel as visceral as the animatronic used all the way back in the 70s. Blake Lively anchors this film with a pretty solid performance. A film like this isn’t what one would naturally think of as an acting showcase, but Lively is called on here to really sell the horror of what’s going on, and the actress rises to the occasion.
It does feel like we haven’t gotten a serious shark movie in a long while. The whole dangerous animal subgenre of horror appears to have fallen out of fashion, and so The Shallows arrives with some novelty behind it. But the film crowds its central tension with a lot of other nonsense, and it isn’t really that good at regularly raising the tension. It isn’t bad, but it does end up feeling pretty thin. It just isn’t much of a meal.
My Rating:
