A beautiful woman lies prone on a small rock island in the middle of a turquoise sea. Her only companion? A seagull. On occasion, the woman—who, a closer inspection reveals, is in some kind of physical distress—speaks to the seagull, nervous little plaints or jokes meant to soothe a stressful situation. The sea laps at the feet of both woman and gull. An ominous dark mass moves through the water. Lonely waves crash on a faraway shore.

Here’s a strange movie, no? A survival film in which a woman talks to a bird—a white bird dotted with the red of blood, just as proud Wilson the volleyball was in Cast Away—but is otherwise alone, left to contemplate the looming, annihilating squish and crunch of mortality by herself, withering under a mean and baking sun. There’s something contemplative, even artsy—artful?—at work here, a sort of Gerry of the sea.

But these pensive, peculiar moments are fleeting in The Shallows, the new shark thriller starring an imperiled Blake Lively and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. (He’s the man who brought us the glorious secret Estonian dwarf of Orphan, and now he gives us Blake Lively talking to a seagull. Gracias, Jaume!) Much of the movie, slim and slick as a wetsuit, is devoted to the thrashing and struggling of survival, as Lively’s Nancy (of all the names) goes surfing, gets bitten by a nasty old shark, winds up on that little rock island, and has to figure out how to get to safety. There’s a lot of screaming and grunting and lingering shots of the cruel majesty of the ocean. (And of our flawlessly bedraggled heroine.) It’s all fun, but still I found myself longing for those quieter moments with Steven Seagull (as Nancy names him). I like that movie a little more.

Nancy arrives at this mostly deserted Mexican cove because her mother, now dead and much missed, went there when she was a young woman. When, in fact, she was pregnant with Nancy. In the wake (surfing!) of her mother’s death, Nancy has dropped out of medical school, abandoned her father and younger sister in Galveston, Texas, and set out on a personal journey. She’s grieving her mother, feeling lost and unsure that the fight of life is worth it. So now she finds herself, blonde and sunny with occasional clouds, on a Mexican vision quest to a deceptively serene beach.

We’ve seen the grief drama-as-thriller genre before, the literal fight for survival meant to serve as a metaphor for the internal fight to move past tragedy. Of course, this movie’s most direct influence (a term I use generously) is Gravity, in which a grieving mother finds herself flung around space, alone and facing dire odds, having to work through the pain to get herself back on terra firma. The Shallows functions much the same way, only instead of Alfonso Cuarón’s whizzing operatics, we have Collet-Serra’s lovingly/lustily filmed heroine and all that churning blue ocean. (And the shark.) Lively is a fine choice for this kind of thing—she’s gorgeous, yes, but, more important, she’s possessed of a curious glow that makes you root for her, an odd mix of goofy earnestness and angelic, otherworldly knowing that provokes both trust and concern.

And a little laughter! There’s something a little funny about Blake Lively. It was there in her lovely fantasy-romance Age of Adaline, and it’s there in The Shallows. It’s the clash of her absurd beauty and poise meeting the every day of her characters. Look, there’s Blake Lively reading braille on some library steps. Behold, there’s Blake Lively battling a shark. You know, Blake Lively stuff. She’s been an appealing actress since her pants went traveling, but now she’s gradually becoming an appealing movie star, a youthful, elegant American with a rare and mysterious quality—she seems both near to us and far away, a close, indifferent moon beaming its pale light upon us lowly mortals gazing up in wonder. And who wouldn’t want to watch such a being going to war with a shark, or suturing herself with earrings (Nancy was a med student, after all)? I wager there are only a few weirdos in this world who don’t want to see that, and thus The Shallows feels as correct as it does frequently silly.