'The Shallows' Champions Feminist Self-Reliance in Latest Trailer for Killer Shark Thriller
Thirty-one years after Jaws terrified a generation, The Shallows will aim give people more ocean-related nightmares — and its latest trailer does much to stoke anticipation for its woman-vs.-shark saga. Watch it above.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, whose track record (House of Wax, Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night) indicates a knack for tensely plotted action, The Shallows follows a young surfer (Blake Lively) who decides to ride some waves in an area that, it turns out, is the feeding ground for a great white shark. It sounds like the set-up for some gory, B-movies thrills, but the above trailer implies that the summer-season release will be a bolder sort of monster movie, one in which the heroine is less a damsel-in-distress and more an active agent of her fate. (That’s also, incidentally, a stark contrast with Jaws, which memorably — and gruesomely — dispatches its pretty blonde swimmer in the first few minutes of the movie.)
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Using narration from a 1951 Coronet Instructional Film called “Developing Self-Reliance,” the trailer builds dread by suggesting that its story will be fixated on our heroine’s efforts to cope with her do-or-die circumstances. Those first become manifest via an under-the-waves shadow, imagery that’s indebted to a host of recent videos and photos of surfers gliding over, or in close proximity to, fearsome aquatic predators — a nice ripped-from-the-headlines twist.
Certainly, this sneak peek at The Shallows indicates a far more stripped-down approach to shark-related horror than its famous predecessors, aiming for something more like the grim survivalist The Grey than the cartoony Sharknado. There also seems to be a distinctly feminist angle: Lively’s capable heroine doesn’t resemble the human chum who often populates those movies.
We’ll see if the movie starts scaring people onto dry land when it debuts in theaters on June 29.
