In the Flesh: Crawl (Patreon)

It's not often you get to see a solid B-movie these days, but in Crawl director Alexandre Aja delivers exactly that. It's a straight creature feature, its cast minimal, its budget shoestring, its flimsy script buoyed by incredible set-dressing, staggering Foley work, and a rock-solid sense of movement through a single rigorously defined environment. The alligators are rendered competently, but it's the sound design that brings them to life. Their grunts and hisses echo through the cramped basement where the film's first two acts are set, creating a distorted soundscape of cold reptilian menace. 

The simple setup -- the gators held at bay by pipes, the two leads attempting to work around them in the flooding crawlspace -- is electrifying and efficiently established. The gore is understated, if a little cheap-looking, the sets excitingly icky from the overstuffed rodent traps in the titular crawlspace to the mossy, corpse-strewn grotto where the alligators nest in an abandoned drainage tunnel. Outside scenes, set in Tampa but filmed in Belgrade, Serbia, are less consistently appealing. The seams in the movie's CGI are much easier to find in its shots of windblown palm trees and roiling walls of storm clouds. 

Crawl's tiny cast, brisk running time, and small scope do a lot to keep it from buckling under the weight of its thinly-sketched father-daughter plot. The global warming subtext is right there, but there's no over-ambitious attempt to drag it into the dialogue or story. Instead the movie wisely leaves the philosophizing to others and focuses on tense, often beautiful shots of bodies moving through water. One scene in which protagonist Haley (Kaya Scodelario) stares up at an alligator hanging motionless near the surface of the rising floodwaters is particularly heavy with quiet, beautifully framed and colored tension.

It's a movie of small pleasures and admirable restraint, refreshing as an unambitious minor work. Its clever sets, steady camera, and Foley work impart an immersive quality to an otherwise artificial production, elevating moments like the protagonists' slow walk across a flooded stretch toward an abandoned boat and Haley stabbing an alligator in the eye with a screwdriver as it tosses her around above the kind of paint-by-numbers thrills larger studio films tend to employ. By setting its sights on craftsmanship and solid scares rather than wit or polish Crawl succeeds as satisfying genre fare, no more and no less.