There are a handful of supporting characters, most of whom end up as shark bait, but in the end, "The Shallows" is a one-woman show that puts Lively on a jagged rocky pedestal and worships her. Lively is superb here, giving one of those hyper-focused, action-lead performances that's as much an athletic feat as an aesthetic one. It revolves around questions that are spelled out so clearly by the filmmaking-much of it wordless, driven by images, sound effects and Marco Beltrami's breathless score-that when Nancy mutters "forty meters" or "I've got you figured out" or somesuch, it's as if the film has momentarily lost faith in its power to excite and upset us. This is a lean, brutal movie about endurance and problem solving.
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There's backstory conveyed through iPhone photos and expository dialogue, and it's as necessary to our appreciation of Nancy's predicament as Dennis Weaver's internal monologues were in Steven Spielberg's breakthrough, pre-"Jaws" TV movie "Duel." I.e., it's not.
Lively's character, a medical school dropout named Nancy, encounters the shark while visiting a beach in Mexico that used to be a favorite of her mother, who recently died of cancer. I'm exaggerating only a little: this slate-grey beast is as immense as the great white that took down the Orca in the first "Jaws," and it's a lot more agile, leaping into the air like a porpoise and twisting to snatch prey in hard-to-reach places. Advance publicity sold "The Shallows" as a horror film or perhaps a modern gloss on " Jaws," but it's really a survival thriller: woman versus nature, with nature represented most but not all of the time by a shark the size of a Winnebago.
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