Crawl review – relentlessly entertaining antidote to overblown blockbusters

In this time of never-ending superhero films and unnecessary remakes, there’s a unique pleasure to be found in a movie like Crawl. Because Crawl – low-budget, unpretentious, and produced by none other than Evil Dead and Spider-Man maestro Sam Raimi – knows exactly what it is and executes its premise with a level of craft and self-awareness that makes it almost impossible not to enjoy.

Crawl is a graduate of the Jaws school of movie making – not only in its dealings with primal creatures but in its dedication to wringing every bit of potential out of a basic idea. The film is directed by Alexandre Aja, who has a particular talent for taking schlocky, pulpy premises and elevating them. His best film, the underrated 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, oozed with a nasty tension and made an unlikely hero out of a baseball bat-swinging nerd. Here he does the same with college student Hayley Keller (Kaya Scodelario), a competitive swimmer failing to live up to her talent. When a category 5 hurricane hits Florida, she sets out to find her dad (Barry Pepper, a brilliant character actor with a reputation for “popping up” in things), only to discover him in the crawlspace beneath his house, unconsciousness and badly injured. It isn’t long before Hayley realises a hurricane is the least of her problems: there’s an alligator (or two) lurking in the shadows.

Crawl is a film that unashamedly puts its protagonist through the wringer. There’s a key moment towards the start in which Hayley crawls through some shit and curses her bad luck. The joke is unsubtle but clear: a whole world of shit is on its way. As one problem is resolved – swimming from one side of the basement to another, for example, dodging the hungry reptiles – a new problem is introduced (is that an egg? is that a nest?). Aja, totally in his element and aided by a tight script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, employs the ticking clock method as the water rises. Meanwhile, Scodelario – brilliant here in what feels like a breakout role – navigates an endless stream of challenges in a way that made me think she’d have been a good Lara Croft in place of Alicia Vikander.

In a film of such claustrophobic proportions, it’s crucial that the audience understand the spacial geography, and Aja – making his film look far better than you’d expect on such a low budget – establishes the layout of the house and the crawlspace like a pro and then piles on the set-pieces, indulging in a series of subversive jump scares (acceptable here: these are alligators!) and clever set-ups and pay-offs. With a plot like this one, it’s also important that Crawl be somewhat self-aware of its B-movie trappings, and it is, though the film never gets too silly. The stakes are real, and when Hayley delivers the obligatory, “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” it’s as much a moment of catharsis for us as it is her – Aja’s winking way of acknowledging the never-ending barrage of pitfalls he’s piled on his heroine.

Crawl could of course be read as a global warming parable or as a cautionary tale on how a particularly strong hurricane could turn Florida into an alligator-infested swamp. Really, though, it’s a film that proves hundreds of millions of dollars, big stars, and tons of hype don’t necessarily make a movie great. Crawl has none of these things and yet it gave me more pleasure than any large-scale blockbuster offered up by the Hollywood machine in 2019 so far. Executives should be taking notes.