As I drove to the theater to watch “The Shallows,” a survival thriller in which a shark traps a surfer 200 yards from shore, I thought about how it would be the perfect popcorn movie. About 45 minutes into the film, I realized I’d forgotten about the bag of popcorn I was holding. When a film can put buttery, salty goodness out of my head, it’s doing something right.
Actually, “The Shallows” does several things right. First, it gives viewers a sympathetic protagonist, and it’s not Jeff Spicolli looking for tasty waves and a cool buzz. Played by Blake Lively, Nancy is a medical student whose mother has passed away. Still grieving the loss, Nancy is thinking about quitting school “since everyone dies anyway.” Her father disapproves, and wastes no opportunity to voice his displeasure. To be alone with her thoughts, Nancy travels to a secluded beach in Mexico where her mother surfed years earlier. The poignancy of Nancy’s story made me pull for her to survive.
Second, the setting is both visually pleasing and topographically suited for the film’s action. Appearing suddenly upon reaching the end of a bumpy jungle road, its dazzling white sand and stunning blue and green waters are nestled within a crescent-moon carving of clay-red cliffs. Beyond it, the ocean and sky go on forever. Director Jaume Collet-Serra gives Nancy a few moments to absorb the sights and sounds of this slice of paradise before plunging her into the drink.
Third, like the director of a play, Collet-Serra thoughtfully arranged his props. Waves roll in from the Gulf of Mexico, washing over a cropping of rock positioned the length of two football fields from the shore; a large navigation buoy bobs on the water about 30 yards from there; and colonies of fire coral have cropped up underwater, providing a painful reminder that remote parts of the Earth can be hostile to the human body. A dead whale provides another, less stable surface above the water, and the rising tide proves to be a problem for Nancy after she takes refuge on it.
Then there’s the ravenous Great White shark that prowls these waters for meals. While Nancy is sitting on her surfboard, drifting with the current, the creature bites into her left leg, rending tissue from bone. After she desperately clambers onto the whale, the two begin a game of cat and mouse that can only end badly for one of them.
Perhaps the thing I enjoyed the most about “The Shallows” was its photography. Collet-Serra devotes more than a few minutes to following Nancy and a pair of locals as they surf, and while cinematographer Flavio Martínez Labiano did some terrific camera work above the waves, his underwater footage really stands out. I loved the shots of Nancy piercing the water like an arrow as a wave rolls past over her head. Perhaps the best shot on the movie is one in which Nancy is struck by the shark and then drug along the bottom of the shallows by her surfboard, which becomes caught up in a current. When she hits her head on the rock below, her long hair spreads like dye being poured into a glass of water. It was a tense, shocking moment made bittersweet by the beauty of the imagery. (I know people like the convenience of streaming a movie at home, but there’s nothing like seeing a well-shot film on a big screen..)
Most of “The Shallows” is a tight, well-assembled, suspenseful film. It also moves fast and never grows boring. Even the scenes in which Nancy is given a breather to figure out her next movie have an undercurrent of urgency. Moreover, Collet-Serra wisely shoots the action in a way that avoids comparisons to “Jaws,” although a few brief shots do appear to pay tribute to the original movie that made people afraid to go into the water.
“The Shallows” only falters at the end, when Collet-Serra begins to play with distance and perspective to pump up the suspense. In one shot, Nancy appears to be close to the buoy as she swims toward it, but in a subsequent shot, she’s shown to be farther away. There’s a sequence near the end that suggests the water in the shallows is actually quite deep, and it plucked me right out of the movie. Collet-Serra needed to use this cheat for the physics of what happens next to work, but I was disappointed.
Still, I recommend “The Shallows” for the preceding 80 minutes. It’s tense, beautifully photographed, and the best all-around creature feature in a long time. I doubt it’ll make you afraid to go into the water, but it might make you forget about your popcorn.
Three stars out of four. Rated PG-13 for bloody images, intense sequences of peril, and brief strong language.
David Laprad is the assistant editor of the Hamilton County Herald and an award-winning columnist and photographer. Contact him at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.