'Crawl' Is a Well-Paced, Suspenseful Thriller with Great Performances

Did the writers of this movie think I NEEDED another reason to not go to Florida?!

Also, I feel like this movie should have been called Swim. I mean, the characters and the alligators don't really crawl that much in this movie. The main character is a SWIMMER. Is Swim not the more appropriate title?

But anyways, I have a review to write. Here we go!

Crawl is a disaster horror thriller written by Michael and Shawn Rasmaussen, and directed by Alexandre Aja, and it stars Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper as a father and daughter who are trapped in their flooding basement with alligators during a category five hurricane.

Now, I didn't know what to expect from this film, because there were no press screenings, and reviews didn't start coming out until yesterday, so I wasn't sure if this creature feature would be any good, and I actually loved this movie.

I thought this movie was directed very well, and once Haley (our main character) enters the house, the film is essentially non-stop suspense. It was directed very well by Aja, who built tension perfectly throughout the film.

Now, jump scares don't usually work on me, but this movie has about two jump scares that really worked. And they weren't cheap scares, either. They were genuinely frightening moments that simply doubled as jump scares, and I loved them.

A lot of this movie takes place in a basement, and something I loved was that there was not one, but TWO obstacles the main characters needed to face. They needed to both avoid getting devoured by alligators, AND they needed to avoid drowning in the flooding basement.

Because of this, the race-against-the-clock scenario provided extra tension as we root for our heroes to escape their situations, as obstacles are continuously thrown at them, and they need to overcome their situations as they go along.

The characters are also given a good amount of development over the course of the film. The father and daughter have a bit of a troubled past involving their family, and even though that idea is a bit familiar, it prevents them from feeling like strangers to the audience.

I also liked how, throughout the film, there are a few people that get eaten by alligators, and these scenes aren't disposable. These scenes all end up serving a new purpose in the plot later, and I liked how they were able to move the plot forward, and have some gruesome deaths at the same time.

Now, before this, I watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, which starred a British Tom Holland playing an American Peter Parker. Then, I watched Midsommar, which starred a British Florence Pugh playing an American Dani Ardor.

And today, I watched Crawl, which starred a British Kaya Scodelario playing an American Haley Keller, and I'm just thinking—is it THAT easy for British people to nail American accents?! Because her accent was spot-on.

The performances from our two leads are both great. They really sell the idea that they're trapped in this situation, and they're both very convincing as their respective characters.

Now, in terms of the problems this movie has, I'd say that I wish the ending had been longer. I feel like it ended too soon, and I wanted to see some sort of epilogue so that I could know more about what happens after the main events end.

And I also feel like parts could be unrealistic given that the two characters get heavily injured multiple times throughout the film, and I found it a bit unrealistic how they never died from blood loss.

In terms of the story, this movie is also pretty average. It's hard to make a creature feature be anything better than what we've already seen before, and this movie is pretty by-the-books for the genre. Because of this, the film isn't particularly memorable.

However, despite its shortcomings, this is a very suspenseful, well-made horror film that I found to be consistently engaging. The pacing is pretty fast, and the tension is unrelenting in this film.

I'm gonna give 'Crawl' an 8/10 (B).

The biggest disappointment was that they never used, "See you later, alligator," as an action one-liner. Talk about missed opportunities.

Thank you so much for reading, and I'll try to have reviews for Stuber and The Farewell out soon.