Crawl

I know the gators are CGI but I’ll be dinged if I didn’t jump every time they showed up. I think the particular power of this movie is that you forget about the artificiality of the monsters and begin to believe in their presence, in the imminent and malevolent threat that they pose to a young woman and her injured father.

Crawl is a great example of pure cinema: the film’s goal is to terrify the audience and the plot gets right down to doing just that. The movie juggles multiple threats while still allowing time for character development. Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper’s portrayals were surprisingly complex, and their relationship was made more real because the film portrayed their reactions to their outlandish situation rather than having hokey moments of connection. They are tough characters and rooting for them comes naturally to the viewer.

Crawl deftly juggles all of its elements – the hurricane, the alligators, the claustrophobic basement – to create a surprisingly believable creature feature. The film respects its genre and doesn’t fall prey to the traditional campiness that other films of its kind often do.