Crawl ★★★

SOME of the most effective films have the simplest premise.

Consider Crawl…’a young woman, while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators’.

Initially this sounds like another variation on the laughable Sharknado films, but it’s infinitely better made and acted and grounded in at least some semblance of reality.

It starts with a flashback to our lead character Haley Keller when she was a young teenager and her father, Dave, was her swim coach.

Fast forward a decade and Hayley gave up a promising competitive career to care for her dying mother.

It’s Florida and amidst the driving rain and thunderous winds she can’t raise Dave on the phone. She drives to his home where she finds him unconscious in the crawl space beneath the sprawling home. Rising floodwaters see the alligators closing on the pair and their fates seem sealed.

It’s actually good fun with plenty of shock tactics and some surprisingly good effects, including what seem like animatronic gators.

The proceedings move along at a good pace and the film doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Kaya  Scodelario as Haley and veteran Barry Pepper as Dave  enjoy their physical roles and bring an authenticity to the relationship.

Behind the camera the achievement on screen includes successful hiding the fact that the film was actually made in Serbia.

The director is Frenchman Alexander Aja who first came to attention with the terrific High Tension in 2003.

His output since then has been generally good – the impressive 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, the guilty pleasure Piranha 3D and the interesting but flawed Horns.

Crawl will keep Aja on the right side of the Hollywood ledger, maybe enabling him to eventually bring us another High Tension quality horror.