CAPSULE: The Shallows (2016, Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra)

I've got to preface everything I say here with the fact that if it is a movie and it has a shark in it, I am probably going to be bleeding by the end of it. In a fingernails in the thighs kind of way.

I've said it before, at length, the sea gives me the willies. The sea and everything in it. Not just sharks. Everything. The fish. Even the seaweed. At a stretch, I can cope with dolphins. But everything else...

Oh, Blake Lively, too, she's in the sea in The Shallows. I can cope with that. Love her.

Therein lies the crux of my complicated relationship to Jaume Collet-serra's film. It gives and then it takes away. Well, it gives and then it sends a savage, flesh-hungering, killing machine with fins in to bite your fucking legs off.

And it has submerged rocks. I hate those, too.

Putting my fears to one side (which I can usually do when watching a scary movie), The Shallows does well with the limited tools in its toolkit (but remember one of those tools has 15 rows of flesh tearing teeth).

The premise is simple, after about 15 minutes of being objectified while she is putting on a wetsuit, 5 or so minutes of irritating onscreen Instagram/videochat/sms action and 10 minutes of exceptionally poorly edited, irritatingly slo-mo'ed surfing on a secluded beach in Mexico (a sound studio in Queensland), Blake Lively is stuck on a rock (soon to be submerged) facing down a terrifying (CGI) shark with nothing but a seagull (kudos on the name) and the SPFX team from Avatar to help her.

I'm only being slightly facetious here. The Shallows is cheaply made, contrived (hello Jaws finale) and often oversteps its bounds (that climax would have taken a medicine and an engineering degree to come up) but it is TENSE (see previous comments re: shark films).

I had a blast. I bled.

To reiterate. I hate shark movies. I love shark movies. I hate The Shallows. I love The Shallows.

★★★

Trailer: