Summary
The Devil’s Mouth is a toothless PG-13 shark flick that barely manages to wade through a runtime that feels twice as long as it is.
The reason characters in slasher movies are always awful is that you’re supposed to get a kick out of them being messily killed off. The Devil’s Mouth, a bit of straight-to-Prime-Video streaming shlock from director Jeff Wadlow (Truth or Dare, The Curse of Bridge Hollow) for Shark Week 2026, isn’t a slasher movie in the strictest sense, but it works on a lot of the same levels. One of them is the character thing. About half an hour into the runtime of this oddly toothless movie, I was rooting for the shark to kill everyone.
I mostly got my wish, but I was disappointed either way. There should be a law somewhere that prohibits anyone from making a PG-13 shark movie. What’s the point? The annoying character gambit only works if their fates are suitably messy. This is a movie about implication; for rating and (I assume) budgetary reasons, almost all of the good stuff happens off-screen, or just below the water of what is very obviously a set. I say again: What’s the point?
The closest point of comparison to The Devil’s Mouth isn’t something semi-cool, like, say, Netflix’s Under Paris, but instead Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s fact-based drama about the soccer team that ended up trapped in a Thai cave for 18 days. Nobody’s coming to rescue any of these characters, though. They’re on their own against each other and a rampaging bull shark sprung to life by PS2-era computer graphics. The premise isn’t half-bad – a bunch of gormless kids trying to navigate not just the dangers of the shark but the complexities of the cave system – but it’s rendered utterly lifeless by Wadlow’s direction and a script – from Aja Gabel and Myung Joh Wesner – that tries to share a single personality across the entire cast.
We might as well talk about the cast, while we’re on the subject. The nominal lead is Kathryn Newton as Sara, who you can tell is the final girl from a mile away because she’s the only one of the braindead clique who seems to have some sort of survival instinct, even if, in the opening sequence, she’s completely abandoned in a smack of jellyfish and spends the rest of the movie with visible wounds as a reminder. But this is mostly designed to characterise the rest of the group: Max (Lana Condor, Pretty Lethal) and her boyfriend James (Nico Hiraga, Booksmart), and Adrienne (Tommi Rose, Sweet Magnolias) and her boyfriend Greg (Gavin Casalegno, The Summer I Turned Pretty). Aside from Max, who has something resembling an arc as Sara’s polar-opposite pampered party-girl bestie who has to come around to her less-cool friend’s way of thinking if she wants to survive, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any of these people.
What I can tell you is that they’re stuck in a cave system in Thailand. It’s supposed to be a bit of fun swimming through the titular Devil’s Mouth, guided by a local named Wat (Tayme Thapthimthong, The White Lotus), but predictably an unlikely monsoon has flooded the fragile freshwater system with sea creatures, including a particularly big and hungry one, and the whole place is on the cusp of collapse. It’s a recipe for disaster for everyone, perhaps most of all the audience.
I’d be hard-pressed to think of a worse way to shoot this movie. It’s dark to the point of long stretches being basically unintelligible, and despite the presence of lanterns and flares, it never uses lighting to break up the visual monotony of the dull cave and its brackish waters. The shark’s CGI, but the PG-13 rating means it can’t even be over-the-top about it, so most of the kills take on an unintentionally hilarious slapstick quality as the thing grabs a deserving victim in its jaws and then smashes itself into the walls like it has forgotten it has teeth.
The cast can’t be bothered either, though I can’t say I blame them. I’m generally disinclined to criticise movies for not being what I wanted them to be, since I figure it’s probably my job to critique what they actually are, but the whole time I couldn’t get a better version of this movie out of my head that looked a lot like Primate, just with a shark instead of a monkey. That would have felt like a much more satisfying use of 104 minutes and would have made putting up with these characters for that long almost worth it. No such luck, though. What we’re left with is a flimsy genre movie that simply wades through its plot like it has nowhere else to be. Unfortunately, I wanted to be anywhere else.
