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Have you ever experienced one of those days where everything seems designed to make your day even worse than it already is? Take that day and exponentially multiply it, and you may have an idea of our lead characters’ plight in Alexandre Aja’s Crawl.
Paramount’s creature feature follows Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario), a collegiate swimmer with an estranged relationship with her father, Dave (Barry Pepper). When Dave goes AWOL on the verge of a category five hurricane, Haley travels to her childhood home to check on him, only to get trapped in a crawl space by large, blood-thirsty alligators. With the water steadily rising, the clock is ticking for the duo to find safety.
What immediately separates Crawl from other creature features is the genre mashup. Aja isn’t interested in making a straight up monster movie, utilizing Mother Nature as a secondary villain to great effect. Every time our leads get ahead of the alligators, the weather impedes their quest for survival. Every time they get around the weather, the gators are lying in wait. The film never lets up, throwing new wrenches into the gears with abandon. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong.
