Blake Lively spends most of The Shallows alone on a rock, 200 yards from a Mexican beach, bleeding from a shark bite. That is the whole movie, and for 86 minutes it is nearly enough.
Jaume Collet-Serra directs from a script by Anthony Jaswinski. Columbia Pictures released it on June 24, 2016. The film grossed more than $119 million against a production budget of $13 million to $17 million. This review scores it 5.9 of 10.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Nancy Adams and the Whale Carcass
Nancy is a medical student, and the film never lets you forget it. She travels to a secluded beach in Mexico, the same one her mother visited while pregnant with her. Her mother has just died of cancer. Nancy is a senior who has started to think about dropping out of medical school before graduation.
Carlos, a local, drives her out and leaves her alone. Her friend stayed at the hotel, recovering from a night of partying. Two locals are already in the water. Nancy surfs with them for hours.
Then she notices the carcass of a young humpback whale. On her last wave in, a large shark knocks her off the board. She hits the reef. The shark bites her leg.
A Tourniquet, Jewelry, and a Wetsuit Sleeve
What follows is the film’s best stretch, and it is all procedure. Nancy climbs onto the whale carcass. The shark rams it from underneath and knocks her off. She swims to an isolated rock.
She uses her surfboard leash as a makeshift tourniquet. Later she uses her jewelry as rudimentary stitches and the sleeve of her wetsuit as a compression bandage. The locals leave the beach without seeing her. She spends the night on the rock.
The Shallows works when it treats survival as a series of small, physical problems. A leash is not a tourniquet until someone makes it one. That is the movie’s real subject.
Steven Seagull
A wounded gull joins her on the rock, also injured by the shark. She jokingly names it Steven Seagull. The bird is the film’s one reliable companion and its one source of humor.
It should not work. It mostly does. A movie this spare needs something to cut against the isolation, and a bird with a bad wing earns its place.
The Drunken Man on the Beach
The next morning Nancy attracts the attention of a drunken local man on the beach. He does not save her. The film keeps refusing the easy exit, and that refusal is the point.
The Shallows runs 86 minutes and does not waste them. Collet-Serra keeps the camera close and the geography clear. You always know where the rock is, where the shore is, and how far 200 yards actually looks from the water.
What the Shark Does Well
The shark is a machine with a schedule, and the film is smart about when to show it. The tagline — “What was once in the deep is now in the shallows” — states the premise without overselling it.
The supporting cast is thin by design. Óscar Jaenada plays Carlos. Brett Cullen plays Nancy’s father. Sedona Legge plays her sister Chloe. The video chat with Chloe and the strained call with her father carry the emotional load, and they land.
Where The Shallows Runs Aground
The film’s weakness is that it has exactly one idea, and it repeats that idea rather than building on it. Nancy gets knocked off something. Nancy climbs onto something else. The pattern holds.
Ranking the film’s assets:
- Lively’s physical performance, which carries nearly every frame alone.
- The survival mechanics — tourniquet, stitches, bandage.
- Steven Seagull.
- The shark, which is effective but never surprising.
- The family backstory, which explains Nancy without deepening her.
That list is also the problem. The Shallows is a well-built machine that never risks much. It is a survival horror film with a medical student, a rock, a bird and a shark. It knows precisely what it is.
A 5.9 Out of 10
The Shallows is a good afternoon movie and not much more. It is lean, competent and occasionally clever, and it never reaches past its own premise.
The film’s box office success makes sense. A $13 million to $17 million budget, a single star, a single location and a clean hook are exactly what a studio wants. The Shallows delivered that. It received generally positive reviews, and this one is more measured.
What matters here is the middle stretch — the leash, the jewelry, the wetsuit sleeve. That is where The Shallows stops being a shark movie and becomes a film about a person solving problems with what is within reach. The rest is noise.
The camera gap between Nancy and the shore is the whole film. It is 200 yards. The Shallows spends 86 minutes proving that 200 yards can be an ocean.
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