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Trailer: The Shallows
When Nancy (Blake Lively) is attacked by a great white shark while surfing alone, she is stranded just a short distance from shore. Though she is only 200 yards from her survival, getting there proves the ultimate contest of wills.
★★★½
Take a young woman in a wetsuit, pit her against a hungry shark and you have something close to the perfect exploitation movie. Jaume Collet-Serra's The Shallows may well be remembered as a minor classic, especially as it has the advantage of actually being watchable – unlike, say, the purely conceptual Sharknado.
One of the assets of The Shallows is the beauty of the central beach location, supposedly in Mexico (in reality, key exteriors were filmed in New South Wales). Another is Blake Lively's rare ability to seem glamorous yet grounded as the heroine Nancy, who runs into trouble during a surfing holiday and finds herself stranded on an outcrop with the tide coming in.
But it could all have fallen flat if not for the zestful style of Collet-Serra, a genre specialist evidently keen to escape the plodding rhythm of his recent action movies with Liam Neeson. The film hardly tries for realism of any kind, with Anthony Jaswinski's script supplying the bare minimum of character background (Nancy has a tragedy in her past and has dropped out of medical school). But nor is it campy in a mocking sense: rather, the images have an enticing Pop Art sheen.
Though the version of The Shallows screening in Australian cinemas is not in 3D, many of Collet-Serra's compositions look as if they were designed for this format, starting with the early close-ups of Nancy's tanned legs, with the glistening sea behind her. The leering gaze induces a perhaps deliberate discomfort, as if the camera were anticipating the hunger of the shark.
Yet Collet-Serra seems as transfixed by the landscape as he is by Lively's presence, suggesting a continuity between humanity and the natural world. In another key early scene, Nancy compares a hilly island on the horizon to a pregnant woman lying on her back, as if imagining the cove as guarded by her lost mother.
The film has its share of effective "jump scares", but by showing off so freely with the camera – trailing Nancy through the water, or looking down at the ocean from far overhead – Collet-Serra forgoes many opportunities to build suspense by sticking with his heroine's perspective. Rather, he plays on the dissonance between the visual pleasure offered to the viewer and the agonies visited on poor Nancy, who has to contend with sharp coral and stinging jellyfish as well as the circling shark.
The existence of GoPro cameras and smartphones within the film's universe allows further games with distance and proximity. Nancy's video chats with her sisters are visualised via screens within the screen, which pop up like hovering, translucent windows, as if the beach were merely the wallpaper on somebody's computer desktop.
This underlines the evanescent quality of the film as a whole, vivid yet strangely free of substance. The computer-animated shark could have leapt out of a video game – and the red of blood oozing from a wound is just another digitally boosted colour, ideally contrasted to the blue of the sea.