A great premise, especially for a horror movie, can go a long way to making a movie successful. Alexandre Aja certainly has a knack for a killer premise. Piranhas attack during spring break? With a premise that easy to buy into, all you have to do is execute it well. Aja has another great one with Crawl: Alligators attack a family during a hurricane. And because it’s Aja, the execution is on point, making sure everyone who buys into the premise will be satisfied.
The alligators in question live in Florida in the swamp. The reason Haley (Kaya Scodelario) is going down there is that her father Dave (Barry Pepper) is not answering his phone as a hurricane is about to hit. Haley gets there to find dad hurt and trapped by a gator who’s been living under the family house. Haley then has to get dad out of the basement to the surface so they can get out before the hurricane unleashes crazy amounts of flood water…and maybe more alligators.
The best asset Crawl has is its brisk efficiency. This movie is only 80 minutes long, and the Aja/Rasmussen brothers script plunges us right in. In 10 minutes, we learn Haley is a college level swimmer, estranged from her stubborn dad whom she loved a lot as a kid, and without her mom, who remarried and moved on, plus we meet the policemen Haley knows who will probably come back to search for her, with disastrous consequences. That leaves 70 minutes for Aja to trap Scodelario and Pepper in the house with alligators during a hurricane, making Crawl totally plot driven, as Haley and her dad search for ways to escape. The variety of scares Aja comes up with as the rescue mission goes on is grotesquely impressive. There’s jump scares (trees hitting windows), slow burning tension (finding an alligator nest), gore (let’s just say the gas station looters don’t have success), disorientation (you know the levees are going to break) and animal fears (an old house is bound to have a lot of creepy animals). Equally impressive are some of the escapes, especially a claustrophobic bathroom elusion. Fortunately, there’s no time to dwell on any of these scenes, because Haley and Dave are in a fight against time to get out, leaving the audience breathless and paranoid where the scare is coming next. With what little downtime there is in Crawl, Aja lets Scodelario and Pepper mend their broken relationship, making the audience root for them to get out alive.
Props to Pepper and especially Scodelario for putting their best foot forward on what looks like one of the most disturbing movie sets in recent memory. Crawl knows what it is, and gives the audience going to see it exactly what it wants to be satisfied leaving the theater. Now that Chicago has it’s own alligator, I’ll be sure to get back in the pool and learn to hold my breath in case of a hurricane related entrapment.