Director Jaume Collet-Serra, fresh off a string of Liam Neeson thrillers (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night), is coming home to horror. His return to the genre is called The Shallows, and it stars Blake Lively as a surfer who is attacked by a great white shark in the shallows of a remote beach and gets stranded a mere 200 yards from shore. The shark circles, the tide rises, and she can’t stay out of the water forever…
Today, Sony gave us the first trailer and poster for the film, and they’re absolutely chilling. Check ’em out below.
I love the minimalist approach here. The water lapping the lens is very evocative of Jaws, but in a great way. The film has one of the simplest premises we’ll see in a major release this year: it’s a woman on a rock, trying to not be eaten by a giant shark. So while the minimalist approach is admittedly necessary, it’s still effective. What I’m so excited about is that The Shallows, if it delivers like I think it might, could be the film that brings sharks out of B-movie purgatory and back to the big screen. In Sony’s official synopsis, they’ve been so bold as the call the film “Jaws for a new generation.” That’s a tall order, folks. But I’m happy to see they’re so confident in the picture.
The Shallows has been making its way around Hollywood since 2014, when its screenplay, written by Anthony Jaswinski, ended up on the 2014 Blacklist, an annual list of the unproduced screenplays most recommended by film executives. Back then, it was called In The Deep, and I’ll say this: If Collet-Serra, Lively, and the team of hard working people around them can translate the tension and shock of Jaswinski’s screenplay to the screen, we may be in for one of the best shark thrillers in a decade.
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