Behind the Couch

With Haute Tension ( Switchblade Romance [2003]), director Alexandre Aja supplied one of the most intense and stressful home-invasion horrors of the 21st century and instigated a wave of transgressive, brutally violent French films collectively known as New French Extremity cinema. Crawl , while nowhere near as searing as Aja’s early work, does see him return to home-invasion territory; albeit with an irresistible man vs nature element. Truly refreshing in its minimalism and back to basics approach, it boasts a rollicking and extraordinarily simple premise (it’s a concept movie, basically): when a massive hurricane hits their small Florida town, Haley (Kaya Scodelario), her father Dave (Barry Pepper) and their dog Sugar (Cso-Cso) find themselves trapped in their basement and have to contend with rapidly rising floodwaters and several giant alligators. The screenplay by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen takes what is familiar, mundane and even sentimental (a family home, full of memo...

2008 Dir. Alexandre Aja When he is suspended from duty after accidentally shooting his partner, former NYPD detective Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) gets a job as a security guard at a deserted department store. Determined to put his life back on track, kick his alcoholism and rejoin his estranged family, Ben soon becomes obsessed with the mirrors in the building and the strange visions they seemingly reflect. With no one to believe his wild stories, he sets out to solve the mystery of what lurks within the mirrors before his mind unravels completely… After kaleidoscopic opening credits and a rather unsettling and menacing scene set in the underground, what could have been a supremely creepy and subtly chilling film, soon descends into cheap jumps, cardboard characters and some really quite lazy writing that explains everything, because, you know, we’re just too dumb to be able to follow the story or piece together some information. Director Aja doesn’t display anything that ...