A category 5 hurricane is brewing and daddy Dave (Barry Pepper) isn’t picking up his phone. En route to her childhood home to retrieve him before it hits, University of Florida swimmer Haley Keller (British actor Kaya Scodelario) drives past an alligator farm; a foreshadowing of trouble in Alexandre Aja’s slender disaster horror.
Aja smartly limits most of the action to the family’s dank, fast-flooding basement – a “crawlspace”, if you will – where Dave is trapped. A congregation of killer gators have made their way in through a drain pipe and are keeping him company. If they are CGI, they don’t look it. Each opportunity for rescue is swiftly scuppered but, as former swimming coach Dave tells his daughter, their escape is mind over matter (“I keep telling you, it’s not your body that’s stopping you”).
The scenes of family bonding are tiresome but the action is mostly tense and cheerfully bloody. French film-maker Aja directed remakes of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Piranha (2010); clearly, he has an appreciation for trashy B-movies. Crawl benefits from its economical 87-minute runtime, but as a genre piece it’s perhaps more skin than muscle.
