The Shallows

Synopsis: After the death of her mother, medical student Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) drops out of university and travels to Mexico in search of her mother’s favourite beach. Surfing alone in the secluded lagoon, Nancy doesn’t realise that she’s strayed into the feeding ground of a great white shark which attacks her and leaves her stranded and injured on a small rocky outcrop just 200 metres from the shore with the tide rising slowly.

The gold-standard for the shark movie is, of course, Steven Spielberg’s 1974 blockbuster, Jaws, while the other end of the scale is probably occupied by 2013’s inexplicably popular cult telemovie, Sharknado (and in case it passed you by, it’s about a tornado at sea sucking up a feeding frenzy of sharks and then literally raining them down on Los Angeles – no, really, it is!). The Shallows sits somewhere around the middle of that scale.

On the plus side, the film has a tantalisingly tense set-up with Nancy choosing to stay out in the water to catch one last wave whilst two other surfers she has just met head home. It’s only then that she spots the nearby floating carcass of a whale that turns out to be where one very big shark is feeding. When the shark first attacks – the most chilling moment in the film – Nancy has a choice between the safety of a protruding outcrop of rock surrounded by nasty, sharp stinging coral or an old rusting buoy. She ends up on the rock where she attends to the bite in her leg with a resourcefulness that would make Rambo proud. She’s too far out to make it to shore, her cries for help are too late to catch the attention of the departing surfers and to add a ticking clock to the mix, the incoming tide will soon submerge her small sanctuary. Her only hope might be the buoy but what are the odds she can swim to it before the shark gets her? It’s a finely balanced equation of hope and hopelessness that, in the hands of a director with a more Hitchcockian bent, could have been an excellent edge-of-the-seat, woman-against-predator survival-thriller. Instead, Collet-Serra (Unknown, 2011) opts for a series of mostly implausible incidents to plump out the thin storyline.

Lively, who most recently strutted her acting chops in last year’s The Age of Adaline does a pretty good job in carrying the film despite precious little opportunity for character development and the burden of some highly expositional dialogue (dubiously, via her mobile with her sister in Texas!). She’s ably assisted by her co-star, a wounded seagull (credited as Sully ‘Steven’ Seagull) who manages to steal more than a scene or two. And, of course, there’s the shark that starts the film promisingly as a malevolent shadowy figure. As the film progresses, though, it becomes more of an actual presence with its inevitable lunges from nowhere, fast-approaching dorsal fin and snapping razor-sharp jaws. The maxim of less-is-more is quickly abandoned in favour of a few cheap thrills that sacrifice the slow-burn of well-paced, rising tension for a handful of scary moments. And, to be honest, they’re not even that scary. Most disappointing, though, is the eventual fate of the shark which, whilst not as bad as in the ridiculous end of Jaws 4, still comes off as a bit of a stretch.

Structurally, The Shallows suffers from a tricksy prologue that steals the suspense away from a key scene later in the film and an unnecessary epilogue that does little more than tie a pretty bow around the story’s inevitable conclusion. Still, it’s magnificent scenery is very nicely shot by Flavio Martinez Labiano with lots of lingering bird’s-eye-view coastal imagery (of the NSW coast, as it turns out) and some good surfing photography but Marco Beltrami’s pervasive soundtrack lacks the menacing undertones of John Williams’ iconic Jaws theme.

 

 

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