Crawl (2019)

Crawl is a 2019 American disaster horror film directed by Alexandre Aja and written by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen.^[2] It stars Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper as a daughter and father, who along with their dog are hunted by alligators after becoming trapped in their home during a Category 5 hurricane.^[3][4]

The film was announced in May 2018, with Sam Raimi producing through his Raimi Productions banner, and Aja attached as director. Scodelario and Pepper joined the cast in July 2018, with other actors being added later that summer. Principal photography began in August 2018 and wrapped in September 2018.

The film was theatrically released in the United States on July 12, 2019, by Paramount Pictures. It has grossed $91.5 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews, with critics praising the performance by Scodelario.

Aspiring University of Florida swimmer Haley Keller receives a call from her sister, Beth, who informs her that Category 5 Hurricane Wendy is on a collision course with Florida and advises her to get out of the state. Haley is concerned for the safety of her father, Dave, as he is not answering his phone. Against the instructions of Florida State Police, Haley drives around evacuation routes to check in on Dave. She first goes to his condo, where he has been living since he and her mother divorced. Haley finds the family dog Sugar at the condo but not Dave himself and is worried that he has returned to the family home in Coral Lake, which he supposedly sold years ago.

Haley and Sugar navigate the flooded streets and find Dave's truck at the Coral Lake house. There, she descends into the crawl space underneath the house while leaving Sugar upstairs, and eventually finds her father unconscious and wounded. When she tries to drag him out, her exit is cut off by large and ravenous alligators that Dave believes got into the house via a storm drain open to the crawl space. The alligators are too large to fit around the pipes under the house, allowing Haley and Dave a safe area at the far end of the crawl space. However, the hurricane intensifies, and the crawl space begins to flood, so Haley attempts to navigate around the alligators before she and her father drown.

While attempting to escape the crawl space and fending off the alligators, Haley drops her phone (which gets crushed by an alligator) and discovers that the second exit to the crawl space is blocked by a table on top of the hatch. She tries to contact a group of looters in a gas station opposite the house for help, but they get killed by alligators. She is also helpless to stop the alligators from attacking and killing two police officers who investigate the house for survivors. Dave manages to kill an alligator by splitting its head open with a shovel but gets trapped. In a last-ditch effort to escape, Haley makes her way to the storm drain, where she discovers that the alligators have made their nest and laid eggs. Haley successfully kills the other alligator using a gun retrieved from the body of one of the police officers, shooting down the alligator's throat when it nearly bites her hand off and makes it upstairs, crow-barring the living room floor open and saving Dave from drowning in the basement.

Free of the crawl space, Haley, Dave, and Sugar procure the looters' boat just as the eye of the hurricane moves over the neighborhood. However, the floodwaters break the nearby levees, flooding Coral Lake even more and crashing them back into the house, where they get separated. While Dave and Sugar make their way up the stairs, Haley navigates around the kitchen and uses a discarded police radio to broadcast a distress signal to authorities.

After retrieving a set of road flares and saving Sugar from being attacked, Dave loses an arm to one of the alligators. Haley attempts to flag down a rescue helicopter from an upstairs bedroom but is attacked by another alligator, which attempts to drown her in a death roll. While Dave and Sugar escape to the attic, Haley stabs the alligator in the eye with a flare and attempts to swim to the roof from the outside of the house, narrowly avoiding being mauled by a fourth alligator before it gets swept away. Haley lights a flare and flags down the rescue helicopter as Dave and Sugar watch.