Female-led survival horror flicks have been steadily making
the rounds over the last handful of years. The Shallows, Crawl, both entries in
the Metres Down series; I guess the recent resurgence in ‘prestige’ horror
cinema combined with the attempts to bring more female lead characters to the screen
have resulted in this intersection. But up until this point, these films have
thrived (or floundered) based on being short but sweet genre exercises, not
rising too far above the benchmark for man vs. nature yarns. And then this film
came along, yet another from the industrious (industrial?) Blumhouse production
line, which… basically recontextualises this entire trend.
