Spoiler Warning: This discussion contains some spoilers. It could be an entire gag from a comedy or in-depth conversation concerning events in the second act.
















Rating: 3 out of 5.

"It is paradise."

The Shallows is a film that I honestly thought I would never watch. I find shark movies have this huge hang-up with the legacy of Jaws looming over them at every point; they just never tend to get over it. I'm thinking of The Meg, 47 Meters Down, or any of the dreadful Jaws sequels. The sub-90-minute runtime is what got me invested, and I wanted to give it a fair shot.

In the end, I was relatively surprised by how decent the film was. It's really not great; in complete honesty, it's one of the most average films I have seen in some time. However, sometimes you need that - and this very specific sub-genre definitely needed it. It has a fun time with the suspense element, drawing out the reveal of the shark, playing around with camera angles and obscuring people with the water. The best thing is that it also has equal amounts of fun with the silly, action-oriented closing third. It's small scale, both in production and length - it's hard to be mad at a film that takes up so little of your time and achieves a good response from you within that time.

I think Blake Lively is outstanding here as pretty much the only person in the film with more than three minutes of screentime: there is immense pressure on her performance. She nails it; the make-up department gets that exhausted, dehydrated, anaemic look just right, and her voice always gets that tenor of hopelessness and desperation in the scenes it needs to. The setting is neat, and Juame Collet-Serra does an okay job behind the camera. By no means perfect, a little self-indulgent here and there, but on the whole, it's shot nicely.

The Shallows is a perfectly fine little horror film. It's good to see Blake Lively doing some interesting work and to see shark movies elevated above parody and straight-up bad filmmaking. There are better films to watch at this length; there's far, far worse. It's inoffensive and truly entertaining for the most part. I'm glad I decided to watch it.

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