★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Jaume Collet-Serra takes a break from Liam Neeson action vehicles to bring us this astonishingly exciting survival thriller. Medical student Nancy (Blake Lively) journeys to a mysterious but beautiful bay of great family significance, but when she enters the feeding grounds of a great white shark she is quickly marooned on an island barely larger than herself, severely injured. Nancy’s only companion as the elements close in around her and the water turns red is a lone injured bird, whom she affectionately renames Steven Seagull (honestly my favourite to win every single Best Supporting Actor accolade next year). Are we sure this comes from the same director who gave us such a dire triptych as Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night?





Lively – with the entire weight of the film resting solely on her shoulders – is simply excellent. Nancy is totally believable and utterly sympathetic; one of the few characters to emerge from 2016’s summer blockbuster season you will actually root for. With such a diverse range of projects in the past year alone as century-spanning melodrama The Age of Adaline, Woody Allen’s high-class comedy Café Society and now The Shallows, she’s slowly but surely becoming a force to be reckoned with. It’s certainly tempting to subtitle the film Blake Lively versus Shark, but this is misleading. Even when Nancy is removed from the hunting ground, she is forced to contend with stinging coral, clouds of jellyfish and the mercilessly methodical tides: there’s a reason it’s called The Shallows.





Obviously, there’s no getting away from comparisons to Jaws (still the ne plus ultra of shark movies), and the makers of The Shallows have taken on board the best possible lesson from the 1975 classic. Hiding the shark as much as possible (though caused by a well-documented series of technical mishaps) created an aura of faceless terror, of an enemy unseen. Transplanted into the contemporary era of CGI and enhanced practical effects, the shark is a more realistic creature, but it is still only revealed in short flashes. A two-second shot of a fin gliding through the water towards our oblivious heroine is one of the scariest moments. The entire film can even be understood as the original Jaws one-sheet turned on its head: what if that terrified woman turned from helpless victim to wily survivor?





But besides this twist on the Spielbergian setup, The Shallows compares much more favourably to Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity: a lone woman (more specifically, a medical practitioner) is cast adrift in an unforgiving void-like environment with only her wit and will to survive, any hope of rescue dwindling hour-by-hour. Much like Gravity, Serra’s film takes occasional pause to marvel at the natural beauty of its protagonist’s surroundings before bringing her back to Earth with a heavy splash. Marco Beltrami’s score contains a whisper of Steven Price, and Flavio Labiano’s camerawork boasts the same floating allure of Lubezki, but the primary colours are turned up to eleven.





While this doesn’t transcend its humble B-movie roots in the same way as Cuaron’s smash-hit did, there’s no need for Serra to prove his worth in a jaw-dropping awards run, either. In a market where shark attack movies are the default setting for schlocky, straight-to-DVD trash, how fantastic it is to have something as genuinely unique, visceral and cinematic as The Shallows.