Crawl

When her sister asks her to check on their dad, living alone in a small Florida town on the eve of a hurricane, Hayley pops in the van to head to his house. But with the house apparently empty, and the rains increasing, her worries begin to increase. And when she finds him under the house in the crawl space, injured after an encounter with an alligator (who is still down there, and is joined by a few more throughout the film), the battle for survival against both the Gators and the rising waters commences.

This is a back to basics thriller-horror movie, with most of the emphasis on two actors (Kaya Scholedario as the daughter, Barry Pepper as the dad) and the gators battling through various encounters in one increasingly damp house. There are a couple of extras who largely exist to get eaten along the way, but the weight is on these two performers (who have both had unfortunate experiences in big budget films after coming to public attention strongly – Scoledario was fake-Kiera-Knightley in the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean after launching in the second generation of “Skins”, Pepper launched strongly in “Saving Private Ryan” before the career-wrecking “Battlefield Earth”). Both hold the screen strongly in a tense, thrilling adventure. At the end of the day, this is still a movie about people in Florida being threatened by alligators, and that’s not necessarily a film for everyone. But this is a very strong execution of that premise.