What constitutes a horror film? Does it have anything to do with a connection to the characters within the film? Should your characters have a certain amount of intelligence? At what point do your scares become cheap? Director Jaume Collet-Serra seemed to wrestle with the question during every aspect of production on The Shallows. Collet-Serra hasn’t ever proven himself as a director that can carry anything more than a Blake Lively-starring vehicle. Like a fourth-rate Alfred Hitchcock, Collet-Serra works with a bare script to create something cheap and offensive to the senses. Everything may be beautiful, but it only takes a look past the surface to realize how little is there.
Lively stars as medical student Nancy Adams. After her Mother passed away, Adams decided to find the beach that her Mother surfed after she found out she was pregnant with Nancy. For whatever reason, Collet-Serra uses half the frame as a mirror to the character’s iPhone as an exposition device. Instead of pacing the backstory throughout the film, it’s all laid bare at the beginning. This is to get it all out of the way so we can immediately care for the character before she’s attacked by Jaws 2.0. She finds out her friend can’t make it when she’s already on the way and she has no one coming to pick her up when she’s done. No one else is there and no one’s on their way.
I commend the one place where the film has patience and its waiting for the carnage to occur. Cinematographer Flavio Labiano takes some gorgeous landscape shots and a few gratuitous body shots of Lively while she surfs. Those shots help us seep in the environment and the mood the film is giving off. It’s not long before The Shallows starts introducing random characters so you can know they will be killed later. A couple surfers here, a seagull there, Collet-Serra takes a little too long and introduces a few too many characters just to extend the festivities.
It’s surprising to find Collet-Serra so stripped down for The Shallows considering his track record for excess. His filmography suggests that we would get an absurd, insane and batshit film about a girl being hunted by a shark. The film could have used a lot more of that insanity. The director’s talents don’t blend well with the story this film is trying to tell. Ultimately a coming of age tale between Lively and a seagull, The Shallows is so bare, it shows how incredibly unsubtle it is. Among an overlong GoPro video message that attempts to show off Lively’s acting abilities (please stop), her range stays the same throughout. That range doesn’t particularly change throughout the film, but she can cry, so that’s a bonus…
Lively is here to anchor the film between all the jump scares that are occasionally clever. If the mood was as effective as some of the jump scares, I’d be writing a very different review. The scares felt cheap by the time a minute long long-shot held on the water as we just wait for something to pop us. It stops being clever and jumps into “assholery.” It’s not good filmmaking. Collet-Serra has a long way to go before he gets to anywhere near good. You could defend The Shallows as some form of B-movie that doesn’t deserve the hate, but that’s exactly why it deserves it. In a year of great genre exercises that didn’t just subvert the genre, but fulfilled it as well, we deserve better as an audience.