But once Nancy is toppled from her board and forced onto a rock thatвЂ™ll only be available until the high tide in the morning, the film morphs with surprising ease into a stranded-tourist thriller pitting an endlessly resourceful woman with a propensity for swimming into hazardous rocks against what appears to be one of the hyper-intelligent great whites from Deep Blue Sea. The early minutes of The Shallows suggest a slower-burning film, with the tension mounting and the faked jump scares arriving early and often. So she swims out, finds a mauled whale, and eventually collides head-on with a massive great white shark. Birds are swarming on something, just a little further from shore. But then itвЂ™s getting late, and Nancy decides to catch just one last wave.

She surfs, she avoids the more irritable coral, she encounters some level of peace and unity with her world. (The film was shot in Australia, but takes place in Mexico.) For an afternoon, Nancy is in heaven. SheвЂ™s a surfer, and seeks out a rare beach that her mother once told her about, to surf and forget her troubles for a while.

Nancy ( Blake Lively) is stuck in the in-between in life, after a family tragedy saw her drop out of medical school and take to the adventures of the unknown.

ItвЂ™s the conundrum and/or gimmick of The Shallows, Jaume Collet-SerraвЂ™s bottle thriller in a wide-open space. But itвЂ™s a nightmare scenario in any case, knowing that everything youвЂ™ve ever known is just two football fields away and yet youвЂ™ve never been closer to death. ItвЂ™s imaginable that the worst part of being trapped out in the ocean, just 200 yards away from shore as a shark is circling you, might be the relative closeness of safety.

The shallows full movie review