I might have been a bit hasty yesterday when I said that we were reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of the quality of the films for the remainder of Shark Week. I'd forgotten that today's film was the recently-released The Shallows, a film that seemingly seeks to emulate the isolation and stalking terror we saw in the second half of Jaws. So I guess there was a little bit of quality left after all.
Nancy is a medical student who has taken some time off from her studies after the death of her mother from cancer. To honour her she has taken a trip to Mexico to visit a secret beach that her mother once visited when she was Nancy's age to surf. Everything about the beach seems perfect - the sands, the water, the waves - and Nancy soon loses herself in the moment. However, a humpback whale carcass nearby has brought with it a great white shark, and when Nancy inadvertently gets too close to its feeding grounds it attacks her. Injured, Nancy is forced to retreat to a small rock island that will disappear at high tide, unable to get back to the beach because of the shark's patrolling, and with no-one around to call for help to. It then becomes a battle for survival; woman versus shark...
For the second half of Jaws, when Brody, Quint and Hooper are off hunting the shark in Quint's boat, director Steven Spielberg worked very hard to make sure there were no shots of land visible in any of the shots, because he wanted to emphasize just how isolated the three characters were out on the open sea. The Shallows clearly wants to have that same sense of isolation, but it goes about it in a different way. For both Nancy and the audience, the beach - and safety - is clearly visible throughout the film and is in fact only 200 yards away, but with the shark in the way it might as well be miles away - and at least Brody, Quint and Hooper had each other for company and to talk to. All Nancy has for the bulk of the film is a seagull named Steven (who, I was pleased to see, got his own credit in the cast credits at the end). The isolation and bleakness of the situation is very real, albeit presented in a different way.
Black Lively plays Nancy, and a special mention has to go out to her as she pretty much single-handedly carries the film for the vast majority of its running time. When the film begins she's quite clearly at a crossroads in her life; her mother's death has caused her to question what she wants to do with her life, including whether or not she is going to continue at medical school and become a doctor. Once it becomes her against the shark, however, her existential crisis becomes much simpler - survive or die. Of course, it helps that she's a med student so she can treat her own leg wound to improve her chances of survival after the shark takes a chunk out of it, but we'll forgive that small plot contrivance.
On the other hand, poor Nancy appears to be one of the unluckiest people alive. Not only does she have the great white shark to contend with, but during the course of the film she also has to deal with fire coral, a bloom of jellyfish that she has to swim through (and having been stung down one leg by a jellyfish myself once, at that point I would have just given up and let the shark have me, if I'm honest), the threat of a thunderstorm and the fact that nearly everyone who could possibly help her ends up getting eaten by the shark - and that's not even the full list of bad luck she suffers (some moments have been omitted due to spoilers). At one point I think Nancy was as much - if not more - at risk from dying of gangrene and/or tetanus than she was from the shark.
There were a couple of points in The Shallows that I didn't like - credibility was stretched a bit thin in one or two places, such as Nancy's ridiculously bad streak of luck. I also felt that her climactic final fight with the shark felt as though it would have been more at home in a more action-driven movie than this was. There's also a Blair Witch Project-style confessional moment that I didn't really appreciate at all, and finally I felt that the film's epilogue was wholly unneeded - it just gave us answers to things that weren't really necessary after everything else we had just witnessed, at least in my opinion. Other than these small flaws, however, I found The Shallows to be a very engaging film that succeeds well in bringing a character-driven horror-thriller to the screen, as well as successfully utilizing the bleak isolation that Jaws also gave us.
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