In a summer of retreads—in which mid-budget, unmemorable sequels (Ride Along 2, The Conjuring 2) and bloated, forgettable sequels (Independence Day: Resurgence, X-Men: Apocalypse) battle for scraps—it’s nice to get something tiny, something new, something borrowed, something true.
The Shallows is a small film. You can count the number of characters who have lines on about one-and-a-half hands. Heck, the number of characters, period. As we open, Nancy (Blake Lively) is headed to a secret beach in Mexico known by very few travelers. We know it’s a secret because the man who’s driving her there, Carlos (Oscar Jaenada), won’t even tell her its name. No mas gringos aqui, por favor, his silent smile seems to say, when she asks where they are one last time.
Nancy is at the beach to take in some waves and shut off her brain. After enduring a family tragedy she’s reassessing her life: Does she want to go back to med school? Does she want to start over? Hopefully the calming vistas and soothing curls of the beach her mother discovered when she was pregnant with Nancy will help the lost soul rediscover her way. She seeks her moment of Zen out on the waves.
What she finds is terror, in the form of a giant shark circling a rotting whale corpse. And what follows is a rather straightforward struggle to survive, as Nancy tries to navigate life on the water with an angry shark trying to finish the job he began on her leg hours earlier.
The Shallows offers something new to viewers tired of sequels and spinoffs and adaptations and reboots and retreads. As best as I can tell, there are just two films in the top 15 of the U.S. box office that are wholly original productions (Zootopia and Central Intelligence). The Shallows is a member of that declining breed of mid-to-low-budget original picture, the kind that comes with low "pre-awareness" because you haven’t seen six other iterations of the story beforehand and thus makes movie executives nervous. After all, who could possibly want to watch something novel?
This isn’t to say the movie will feel wholly unfamiliar to audiences. The Shallows is most obviously going to call to mind Jaws, though it does so whilst borrowing elements of 127 Hours (in that we spend most of our time focused solely on one person trapped in a horrifying situation) and Castaway (Nancy’s sole companion is a friendly seagull who helps stave off delirium and madness, a slightly peppier Wilson the Volleyball).
For all of its silliness and starkness, The Shallows feels somewhat true. It is, at heart, a story about a woman trying to overcome a difficult time in her life—and I don’t mean the shark. It’s a position we’ve all been in at one time or another: questioning one’s choices if not succumbing to despair outright, we all need a little push every once in a while to get back on the right path. If it takes a bit of ruthless terror to get you there, well, that’s all the better.