THE SHALLOWS – Review

Economic and immersive, THE SHALLOWS is an 87-minute tale of one woman trying, choice by choice, to keep the odds going in her favor. 200 yards from shore, surfer Nancy (Blake Lively) is bitten, then trapped, by a great white shark. She’s at first perched on a dead whale, then a rock, then a rusty, anchored buoy. Suffering a nasty wound on her leg, she tries screaming for help from the occasional passersby, but they soon become shark snacks. Director Jaume Collet-Serra gets exposition out of the way quickly through a series of brief phone calls that show Nancy has found the Mexican beach her late mother visited while pregnant with her. She’s dropped out of med school and is close to her father and younger sister. We learn this efficiently in the first few minutes, then its straight to the beach for a bit of surfing followed by that tense hour of showdown.

The plot, which takes place over about a 36-hour period, is single-minded (like a shark!), the cast minimal and the pace energetic, but THE SHALLOWS delivers and is a real pleasure to experience. Though the concept and some of the shocks are familiar, Collet-Serra manages to craft some nail-biting set pieces while locking us into his hero’s predicament. In one particularly taut scene, a chubby Mexican passed out on the beach responds to Nancy’s screams by snatching her purse and foolishly heading out to steal her surfboard. Blake Lively is excellent, holding the screen using mostly her emotional reactions and strong physical presence (not to mention her fine bikinied bod) as she rises to the challenge of survival in the tightest of circumstances. There is some dialog between Nancy and an injured bird she nicknames ‘Steven Seagull’ that cleverly illustrates what’s going on in her mind, similar to the relationship between Tom Hanks and ‘Wilson’ in CASTAWAY. Cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano provides gorgeous imagery, especially shots captured from beneath the ocean’s surface. A scene with Nancy and the shark both navigating through a school of deadly glowing jellyfish has a ghostly beauty.

THE SHALLOWS hardly reinvents the wheel, but it’s an unfussy genre thriller that does its job well. The tropes of a single character’s survival (or otherwise) may be familiar from CUJO or GRAVITY or even 127 HOURS, but when directed as thrillingly as THE SHALLOWS, the tropes are easy to swallow.

4 1/2 of 5 Stars