Jaume Collet-Serra

Somebody reads a text message and the words appear beside their head, on the window of the plane or the face of the sea. Jaume Collet-Serra does not cut to the phone. He keeps us where the character is, and he has already told us where the door is, how many rows back the suspect sits, how far the rock lies from the beach. The fear in his films comes from knowing the distances. The Shallows (2016) is the purest version: one woman, one rock, one shark, 86 minutes, and we came out grinning.

He arrived through music videos and commercials, which may explain the economy, and made his name with horror: House of Wax (2005), then Orphan (2009). Between those and the shark came the Liam Neeson years, four films in which a tired, decent man is trapped in a machine with a clock on it: Unknown (2011), a plane in Non-Stop (2014), a car in Run All Night (2015), a train in The Commuter (2018). Then the studios called. Jungle Cruise (2021), with Dwayne Johnson, kept his clarity; Black Adam (2022), with Johnson again, buried it under effects, and the action, usually his strength, came in short bursts that did not build. Carry-On (2024) took him back to an airport, which is where he belongs.

What he does well he does with Flavio Labiano, who has shot five of his films: wide anamorphic frames that rarely sit still, a camera that moves when the character's mind does. In The Shallows the first bite is staged from the surface, a jolt and then nothing, and we flinched, properly, because the nothing is worse. Later Blake Lively does something to her own leg with her jewellery and Collet-Serra holds on her face rather than the wound; we watched most of it through our fingers and admired him for making us. He gives actors room inside the machine, Lively on the rock, the supporting cast in Orphan, and the machine does not slow down for them.

The faults are as consistent as the virtues. Once the premise is set the plots run on familiar rails, and The Commuter is the usual example; The Shallows spends its last fifteen minutes doing what shark films do when the ideas run out. Genre critics rate him and the rest have never quite decided he is anyone in particular, which is understandable, since the films most like each other are his best. He has said, "I’m always trying to do ‘Die Hard’ over and over again." We would take that trade. Give him one person, one place and a clock, and he is worth your evening; give him a universe and he disappears into it.