Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry we get a little bit artsy with it, as Jaume Collet-Serra and Blake Lively bring us the survival horror tale The Shallows.
As this survey of shark movies gets deeper into the new millennium, I’ve made a conscious effort to shy away from the avalanche of streaming slop as much as possible. There are only gonna be so many entries in this series, and moving forward I want to focus on more substantial entries. I just plain don’t have the patience to sift through a mountain of crap CG shark movies. Gimme the good stuff, and get out of my way.
With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to one of the true gems of the modern era: Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2016 feature The Shallows.
The Shallows is a lean, mean little thriller that pits Blake Lively against a ravenous great white shark almost entirely by her lonesome. It’s 90-ish minutes of pure, white-knuckle tension, shot on the cheap without sacrificing Collet-Serra’s signature visual flair. That alone puts it head and shoulders above most other shark movies. There’s a visual style at work here wholly unlike anything we’ve seen so far, photographing the waves and reefs in a way that echoes the lacerations and gashes inflicted by the film’s antagonist. It’s not especially graphic, but the visual metaphor is potent nonetheless.
Lively stars as Nancy, a med school dropout surfing off a secluded beach in Mexico. She has a photo of her mother on that very beach, at the time pregnant with Nancy. Her mother has just passed, and to honor her memory (or more likely escape her own grief), Nancy wants to surf in the spot her mom loved so much1. Before suiting up and hitting the waves, Nancy facetimes with her younger sister and father (Brett Cullen), who begs her to come home and finish med school. Nancy doesn’t wanna hear it, reasoning that “some people can’t be helped”. It’s a pretty fatalist view of the world, and she’s about to learn real quick the only person you can ever truly help is yourself.
After surfing a few waves (beautifully photographed by Flavio Labiano2), Nancy meets a pair of fellow surfer dudes who try to talk her into joining them back on the beach. She turns them down, saying she wants to ride one more wave, but they’re cool about it, so they leave her to it. Unfortunately, that’s the moment a huge great white shark appears and knocks Nancy off her board. A nip at her leg leaves her with a deep gash in her side, forcing Nancy to seek refuge on a whale carcass floating nearby. And now we have our setup. It’s almost Hitchcockian in its simplicity; one person, in imminent danger, with nowhere to run.
It’s also here where the movie starts to really play dirty. Not content to let Nancy hide out on a floating whale carcass, the movie decides that the forces of nature must now antagonize her for it. The seagulls picking away at the whale aren’t exactly her friends, to say nothing of the shark. But physics also has it out for her, as the whale carcass comes unmoored from the reef and starts rotating in the water, forcing Nancy to seek refuge on an exposed rock. As the tide goes out, Nancy finds herself stranded, helplessly waving and screaming at anyone for help. Inevitably, of course, it just leads people to certain death.
I love this shot. It’s such an evocative image, and it reveals the movie as a little bit artier than it seems at first blush. Think of the classical image of the siren; the beautiful woman sitting on the seashore, beckoning sailors toward their inevitable doom. (I mean, it’s right out of The Odyssey, to reference a more recent film.) But here, Collet-Serra twists that image. Nancy tries with all her might to warn the surfers away from the water. “No, stop! There’s a shark! Get out of the water!” But they don’t care. All they see is a pretty girl in distress and try to swim out to help her. Despite all her warnings and pleas to not come any closer, they can’t help themselves. They swim out to meet her, and get immediately chomped to pieces.
Inevitably, it comes down to a battle of wits, as these things often do. Nancy has to use her med school training to stitch herself up whenever necessary. At one point she sutures a nasty laceration with nothing but an earring and a necklace, legit the most stomach-turning moment in the film. For her part, Blake Lively does some of her best work here, almost completely carrying the film solo. Apparently she lobbied for the role after seeing Buried, starring her husband Ryan Reynolds, in which he’s trapped all by himself in a coffin for 90 minutes. She wanted to try a role like that, and I gotta say she nails it. Doesn’t hurt that she’s given a whole lot more to work with.
If I have any one criticism of the film, it’s that while the film provides a wellspring of complications and obstacles for Nancy to overcome, it seems to come to an abrupt end when they’ve finally run out of ideas. Nancy’s final showdown with the shark comes to a head that doesn’t exactly feel earned. The method of the shark’s ultimate demise is never properly established, lending the final showdown a feeling of pure happenstance. It almost feels like the movie’s just ready to end and doesn’t care how it gets done. This isn’t enough to derail The Shallows, but it’s not exactly a satisfying climax.
The Shallows cost roughly $15 million, which is peanuts these days to a major studio like Sony Pictures3. It’s exceedingly rare when a movie like this not only gets made, but actually succeeds at the box office. The Shallows opened the same weekend as Independence Day: Resurgence, and while all three of that week’s new features combined (the other being The Free State of Jones) couldn’t beat Pixar’s Finding Dory in its second weekend, The Shallows still managed to bring in over $100 million by the end of its run. Not bad for a scrappy little shark movie.
FINAL RATING
4 stars (out of 5). S’pretty damn good.
NEXT TIME: USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016)
- Also worth noting that Lively was pregnant herself during this particular shoot.
↩︎ - Jaume Collet-Serra’s go-to cinematographer. This is the fourth of six films they’ve made together, including the upcoming Cliffhanger remake.
↩︎ - Hell, it’s less than both Bait and Shark Night, which both cost upwards of $20 million. ↩︎
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