Review: "The Shallows"

COLLET-SERRA, Jaume, “The Shallows”, Columbia Pictures/Weimaraner Republic Pictures/Ombra Films/Sony Pictures, 2016.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about the generally overlooked levels of intelligence that fish demonstrate so God only knows why I decided to watch this. Glutton for punishment, obviously. Actually, it’s not such a stretch: while there is no way in the world that I would ever get into the water with one, I do actually like sharks. They’re cool, creepy, and perfectly designed for what it is that they do - they’re a designer’s wet-dream. They are also horribly threatened with extinction because several million Chinese people think that eating the fins off a shark turned into a soup will make them more of a man. Yeah right: wield that can-opener like a boss, dude – it’s as close as you’ll ever get to a shark (or to being a man).

Seriously, this kind of witchcraft is wholesale-killing every other species on the planet, while its perpetrators see no problem with over-running the joint and putting extra pressure on the limited resources left. Frankly, anyone who orders shark-fin soup needs to be put into a tank with one, along with a spoon, and told to do their best.

The other problem is that people are stupid: every time some idiot goes into shark-infested waters and gets devoured (no surprise, there) the population of the country nearby goes into a tailspin and begins to demand culls and drag-netting and the arbitrary lifting of threatened status listings. Craziness. To put this in perspective, 15 people in Western Australia have been killed by sharks in the last 17 years. That’s less than one a year. Far more people than that die each year from bee-stings, cattle incidents and automobile accidents. But heaven forbid we’d ever forego honey, or cheese, or the chance to limit the obesity epidemic by using our legs, so we scream out for shark culls. If sharks looked like pandas, I bet there’d be a totally different narrative.

So a part of me was hoping that the shark would win at the end of this film. Obviously, I have high expectations.

The set-up for this piece is quite elegant. A young girl taking a break from med-school after the death of her mother from cancer, goes to the Mexican beach where she, herself, was conceived, looking for surf and closure. She spends a pleasant day surfing with two local lads (don’t get attached) and then, as night begins to fall, heads out for one last wave-ride. Sadly, not a smart move.

She discovers the carcase of a whale floating offshore, heavily chewed-upon by something with big teeth. She decides to surf back in to shore, leaving this unpleasantness behind, but she gets bushwhacked by a Great White Shark that jumps out of her wave and chomps on her leg. She manages to get back to the dead whale before it completely eats her and, just before the shark knocks her off this tenuous perch, she makes a break for a tiny outcrop of rock poking up through the waves.

With this opening salvo, the movie paints a clear map of the world for our beleaguered heroine: the rocky reef outcrop (slowing sinking beneath the waves as the tide rises); the dead whale which slowly moves out to sea; a weather-beaten old buoy, 30-40 yards away from the reef; and the beach, 200 yards distant. With just these tiny locales, one monster fish and the limited clothing and jewellery which Nancy is wearing throughout her ordeal, the director paints a compelling and horrifying tale of grim survival.

One complaint I’ve read is that the shark seems a little too intent on taking out the trapped Nancy, but with the benefit of all the reading about fish intelligence I’ve been doing lately, I had no problem with it. Researchers into animal intelligence conducted a series of tests to see if various species could prioritise their activities, thus showing the ability to plan and to understand the passing of time. It basically went like this: food was provided to the test animals, half on a blue plate and half on a red plate; after half-an-hour, the red plate was taken away, regardless of whether its contents had been finished or not. Of all the animals, fish and birds who worked out that, if you eat off the red plate first, you get access to a greater amount of food overall, only cleaner Wrasses (a fish) got it. As far I could tell, the shark knew that the whale carcase in this scenario was going to hang around for awhile; Blake Lively, on the other hand, was definitely sitting on a red plate. Given that three people get chomped in this movie, of which only one is definitively eaten, I can also assume that the shark was getting cranky about the stupid monkeys giving it the slip all the time.

Without having to warn of spoilers, our heroine gets away from the shark; but she does so using only the meagre amount of stuff that comes to hand, plus her medical training. At no time did I think that there was any fudging of reality to make things work out right: every win in this flick is hard-bought and comes with some terrifying punishment (the bite on Nancy’s leg, for example, is particularly sick-making). A lot of what transpires is made to happen through the magic of CGI; however, this is one of those films (like Jim Jarmusch’s “Deadman”, or “30 Days of Night”) where its use is subtle and unobtrusive – “Rogue One” this ain’t.

In the final analysis, this comes across more like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, rather than just 86 minutes of a cute girl in a bikini (although it is that, too). It’s an exercise in making the most out of very little and scoring a touchdown. Blake Lively’s Nancy is a tough and resourceful character, right up there with Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, and grounds the character, giving the lie to any notions of simply being the cheesecake, or some kind of monster’s obsession in the mode of “King Kong”. This film doles out the required information in easily-digested particles, setting up the final confrontation with elegance and ease. The director takes a gamble by establishing the map of the story without allowing those same elements to float away at any point; but it works as a solid framework for the narrative, so, as far as I’m concerned, reality can take a backseat for awhile. I was too busy watching the waves for signs of teeth to really notice.

Four Tentacled (and toothy!) Horrors from me.