FEAR IN FULL FLOOD: What Makes ‘Crawl’ (2019) So Great

A midbudget natural horror film from Alexander Aja swims where it could just as easily sunk.

I’ve got a weird relationship with hurricanes.

Before I was even born, my family had become expert preppers for tropical storms in Puerto Rico. I literally did not even get a month of peace alive starting out, because when I was just a few weeks old, a hurricane nearly blew out our windows and flooded the place we lived in. And imagine how pissed I was when we moved to Jersey, and, whoops, the weather sucks here too! Shoutout Hurricane Sandy.

The point is, I’ve had a solid amount of time to learn the capacity for hurricanes to be absolutely terrifying. And no movie has utilized that nightmare scenario as Crawl has. Just imagine how sore I was when I realized how badly I missed out on not seeing this film in theatres. So, what better time than the present, our rainy month of April, to give this a retrospective?

A Tale of Survival and Alligators

The chips were stacked against it, so much so I was wondering if this was just a film that Paramount Pictures needed to get out there before it was trapped in a New Mutants-esque film limbo. Luckily enough, it isn’t. It’s just a good old-fashioned creature feature, and a Sam Raimi production at that. It’s the kind of film we need to start returning to. I’ll be the first to shout the sentiment that I want shorter films made cheaper, and the brisk pace of this film lets it succeed on both fronts while still looking incredibly good.

Here we have the story of college athlete and swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario), who goes to rescue her estranged father, Dave (Barry Pepper). Their banter is nice at times, but their strong suit throughout this film is being terrified and mauled by violent alligators who made their way through the storm drain.

Is the dialogue between them corny at points? Yes. Do I care much about their relationship? No. But you get invested in their survival real fast because of the viciousness of it all. You didn’t come to the big alligator show for the heartfelt emotional speeches; you came here for the carnage, and this film has plenty of limb severing, death-roll spinning, combination swim-wrestling carnage. A mixture of puppetry, motion capture acting, and CGI makes for some of the most intimidating reptiles on the silver screen since Lake Placid. Usually, it’s best to show the monster sparingly, never putting them in the light for too long lest their imperfections start to bleed through. But these gators are in full view for a lot of the runtime and still manage to pull off the task of eliciting a jolt to the system with well-placed jump scares, attacking from the odd angles, and leaping from the water compensates for the sometimes-telegraphed feeling deaths.

However, the highest technical achievement of this movie is the effects surrounding the hurricane itself. It’s layered, visually humid, and borderline smothering in the best of ways. It adds so much atmosphere with a set design on a limited scale, contributing to the claustrophobic nature of this home being taken over by its new amphibian owners; its dynamic enough as is, but when the flooding kicks in, a normally cozy home becomes even more of a death trap as the race to get to higher ground kicks in, and the alligator’s area of influence expands. Not to mention that the expansion lends to some great underwater shots thanks to Aja’s directing. What else should you expect from the man who brought us one of the best horror remakes of the early aughts with The Hills Have Eyes (2006)?

BOTTOMLINE: I’d recommend this to anyone who needs a major change of pace in their horror viewing habits to watch something a bit shorter and punchier. This is a criminally slept-on creature feature that you can knock out on a rainy day or as part of a monster movie marathon. Sink your jaws into this one ASAP.