Long before the It Ends with Us hullabaloo, Blake Lively was an actress trying to find her footing on the big screen after the end of a massively successful TV show. Her first post-Gossip Girl movie was the 2015 romantic drama The Age of Adaline, which was a middling success, but she followed that with the most out-of-left-field choice possible: the shark survival thriller The Shallows, a smash hit that turns 10 years old this month.
The Shallows Brings Something New to the Table
The Shallows, which debuted on June 24, 2016, is one of many, many, many killer shark movies that popped up in the wake of the record-shattering success of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws. These titles include everything from the 1977 Italian rip-off Orca: The Killer Whale to the 1999 Renny Harlin schlockbuster Deep Blue Sea to the 2018 Jason Statham action-adventure movie The Meg.
However, The Shallows stands out among the crowd - and is in fact one of the best examples of the subgenre - because it is almost nothing like Jaws, beyond the fact that it also features a ravenous great white shark.
Where Jaws was a character drama about a small town and a nuclear family that was intruded upon by the shocking brutality of a killer shark’s rampage, The Shallows is a taut, pared-down survival thriller about a single character that features almost no dialogue.
It has a simple arc: a young surfer grieving the loss of her mother learns to appreciate her life again by being forced to fight for it when she is stranded on a rock off the coast of Mexico with a hungry shark between her and the shore. Even more than it resembles Jaws, it takes after Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in the way that it puts a woman who doesn’t think she has a reason to live into an impossible situation and escalates the stakes more and more, to the point that watching the movie becomes almost unbearably thrilling.
The Shallows Is an Exemplary Shark Movie
The Shallows shines in a myriad of ways, not the least of which is the performance delivered by Blake Lively. Her role as Nancy Adams presents a huge acting challenge, as she is the central focus of every scene and yet hardly speaks throughout the movie. However, Lively commands the screen, embodying the character’s internal (and eventually external) pain in a realistically human-scale, captivating way.
‘The Shallows’ (2016)Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing
By praising Blake Lively, we are not trying to diminish the talents of her most prominent co-star, Sully Seagull. The bird’s portrayal of Nancy’s gull buddy Steven stands among the best animal performances of the 2010s, alongside The Witch’s Black Phillip and War Horse’s Joey, shouldering the burden of the movie’s core visual metaphor as Steven slowly transitions from forlorn and sympathetic to a shining beacon of hope.
While both of those performances are enough to anchor The Shallows, the movie around them is also superbly crafted. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (returning to the horror-thriller genre for the first time since his 2009 hit Orphan, having exclusively helmed Liam Neeson action movies in the meantime) brings his signature flair to the project.
No matter what shot scale he and cinematographer Flavio Labiano (with whom he has collaborated on multiple projects, including Non-Stop and Jungle Cruise) are using at any given moment, it is best designed to deliver a gut punch. The gasp-inducing wide shots deliver first the grandeur of the beach and then its devastating seclusion. The close-ups treat the audience no better, giving them a no-holds-barred look at the damage that this predicament is inflicting upon Nancy.
The movie also wields sound design as a tool with which to torment the audience, going muffled and quiet as the camera slips underwater and increasing the sense of the shark’s foreboding menace.
How the Last 10 Years Have Treated The Shallows
Although The Shallows was a critical and commercial success (earning a Certified Fresh 78% score on Rotten Tomatoes and grossing $119.1 million worldwide against its roughly $15 million budget), its star has unfortunately fallen somewhat in the 10 years since it debuted. Part of that may have to do with the reputation of Blake Lively, which has been damaged by an alleged smear campaign perpetrated by her It Ends with Us co-star Justin Baldoni, which pounced on certain less-appealing aspects of her off-screen life.
Regardless of the drama swirling around its star, The Shallows is still an excellent movie any way it’s sliced. In fact, it landed alongside titles like Dolemite Is My Name and Only Lovers Left Alive on TIME's list of the 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century, which was published earlier this year.
‘The Shallows’ (2016)Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing
However, The Shallows has had a noticeable impact on Hollywood in a variety of ways. In addition to clearly inspiring the 2019 “Kaya Scodelario vs. an alligator” thriller Crawl, the movie’s success helped launch director Jaume Collet-Serra to even higher prominence in the industry. Although he briefly returned to the Liam Neeson well with 2018’s The Commuter, he has since gone on to helm a number of major movies, including the big-budget Dwayne Johnson titles Black Adam and Jungle Cruise, the Taron Egerton action-thriller Carry-On (the third most-watched movie of all time on Netflix), and the upcoming Cliffhanger reboot starring Lily James.
So, are you planning to throw on The Shallows in honor of its tenth anniversary? Did you see it in theaters, or will this be a first-time watch? And what do you think of the 2016 aquatic horror hit? Sound off in the comments below!
