They're hyping this one as "the best shark film since Jaws". Seriously? The muddy psychological waters of the 1970s -- the collective fear and anxiety lurking in the Vietnam War years channelled into a shark -- has given way to the lone, existentialist despair of the iPhone generation of the 2010s. In the Steven Spielberg film, we're swept into the hunters' dark obsession, the exorcism of the demon within and without; in The Shallows we have something much less complicated: survival. And it helps that the person struggling to survive despite being stranded just 200 hundred yards from shore is played by Blake Lively -- blond, bruised, brave, sun-tanned and bikini-clad.
Best shark film since Jaws? Not quite, but who cares when we have Jaws plus Baywatch here?
Lively is Nancy Adams, a Texan surfer on a trip to a "secret beach" in Mexico. Stood up by her friend, she arrives at the sandy paradise of turquoise waters with rolling waves. After a Mexican driver asks how she plans to return to town from this isolated spot, she says confidently: "Uber". Nancy is phone-addicted ("I'm American", she says as a disclaimer), and one of the most painful ironies is that when she's marooned on a precarious slab of rock not far from the beach, the technology she trusts her life upon is suddenly rendered useless.
The Shallows gives us some context about Nancy's departed mother and the reason she has come to this beach, but this is a film that's most enthralling when it ignores explanation and focuses on the experience: raw, situational cinema as a document of danger, when nothing matters except the bare second confronting the character. When the shark arrives, angry and voracious, its fin ominously slices the surface in a visual shorthand that brings so many memories, though without John Williams' cello-charged score. Bitten and bloodied, Nancy scampers away and makes it to a tiny rock protruding from the water in low tide. The vengeful shark, for some reason beyond evolutionary science, circles and stalks her every move.
Nancy, or Lively, is all alone in the water and in almost the entire movie. It's her against nature (that this nature is demonised is another story). This is somehow different from, say, Robert Redford in All Is Lost, in which he is stranded in the ocean and which is the Americanised version of Robert Bresson's extreme objectivity. In The Shallows, it's Lively's body against the body of water: her face, her hair, her eyes, her slashed thigh and arms -- the film derives its texture from the bruises of this beautiful body. But this is not an objectification of a damsel in distress, because the film belongs to Nancy -- it's her gaze, panic and later crazed, that looks out at the patrolling shark contemplating the way to beat it. Strong females, the film suggests, are a force greater than that of ferocious nature.
By all means, the film could have been more abstract; it could've gone further in the display of experiential despair. It could've been darker, though that would certainly scare away the targeted demographics, male or female alike, who'll be drawn to the cinemas less by the promise of a shark than by the presence of Lively. And she deserves the credit here: first she is sunny and sentimental, then she grows desperate, tough, and just enough of a fatalist at the end. No more a gossip girl, Lively, now a mother, is one woman against the beast and it's impossible not to root for her.
The Shallows
Starring Blake Lively.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.
Sneak preview this week (8pm showtime). Wide release next Thursday.
