‘Thrash’ Review: Phoebe Dynevor in Netflix Shark Survival Thriller

Every shark movie owes a debt to the sacred mother Jaws, but the thriller about bitey creatures spreading carnage and mayhem in bad weather that Thrash most resembles is Alexandre Aja’s superior nail-biter, Crawl. (By the way, where is that sequel we were promised?) Instead of voracious alligators preying on Florida locals trapped by a Category 5 hurricane, this time it’s a bunch of aggressive bull sharks and one very hungry pregnant great white cruising into a coastal South Carolina town when the levees break and the floodwaters rise. 

While the title begs to lose the first “h,” Tommy Wirkola’s film is actually kind of fun in its silly, disposable way, and should do decent numbers on Netflix, where it was picked up after Sony dropped plans for a theatrical release. That’s if audiences can get on board with eyebrow-raising plot points like Phoebe Dynevor’s Lisa popping out a baby in surging waters, and almost immediately after, telling the infant: “Mommy’s here. Mommy’s just gotta fight some fucking sharks.”

Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) appears to want to have it both ways, peppering Thrash with self-aware humor and Sharknado-adjacent absurdity while also crafting a semi-realistic disaster movie that reaches for contemporary relevance by noting the substantial increase in frequency, intensity and duration of Atlantic hurricanes and the deadly threat of the storm surge. The result is a film that’s neither one thing nor the other, though at just under 90 minutes, it’s pacy, pulpy and eventful enough to amuse fans of the shark subgenre.

We meet the appealing main characters as Hurricane Henry picks up speed and onscreen text marks the time remaining until landfall.

Transplanted New Yorker Lisa works in the offices of the McKay’s Meats plant (presumably a winking nod to producer Adam McKay). She’s now pregnant and alone after moving thousands of miles from home for a jerk fiancé who promptly ran off. Her concerned mother badgers her over the phone about giving more thought to a water birth (a joke whose payoff comes much later) while she drives past townsfolk scrambling to comply with the mandatory evacuation order. Learning that the interstate is already closed, Lisa realizes she has left it too late to flee.

Eighteen-year-old Dakota (Whitney Peak) lost her father at a young age and is still traumatized by the recent death of her mother, her anxiety making her agoraphobic. She insists on sheltering in place until marine biologist Uncle Dale (Djimon Hounsou), who’s two hours up the coast by boat, can come to rescue her. When Lisa gets trapped in her car by a fallen tree, Dakota is forced to venture outside or watch the expectant mother drown just as she’s going into labor.

Meanwhile, across town, teenager Ron (Stacy Clausen) and his younger siblings Dee (Alyla Browne) and Will (Dante Ubaldi) are stuck at the mercy of their negligent foster parents, who cash their government subsidy checks and feed the kids dry Wonder Bread while they eat steaks. 

Their redneck adoptive father Billy Olson (Matt Nable) is smugly certain that reinforced glass, waterproof wiring and a home generator will see them safely through the storm. (“Ain’t nothin’ but a little bit of weather.”) But when a wall of water crashes through the windows, turning the living room into a swimming pool that’s soon crawling with dorsal fins, the kids are left to fend for themselves.

Shooting mostly on a studio lot and in a purpose-built tank in Melbourne, Australia, Wirkola handles the hurricane elements confidently, mixing practical effects, stock footage and only occasionally distracting CG as trees fold in the fierce winds, cars are swept up, roofs torn off and walls demolished. He drops in enough secondary characters to provide shark food while the principals battle to survive. A McKay’s Meats tanker truck that gets split in half, disgorging industrial quantities of fresh chum, is a droll touch. 

The Norwegian director balanced horror, humor and action with more panache in the films that put him on the map, Dead Snow and its sequel, which dumped Nazi zombies in mountain woodlands. Jokey moments like Lisa playing Vanessa Carlton on her phone to calm her as contractions get closer seem a tad forced, as do some of the one-liners, like Dee telling her little brother, “Hey Will, bet you never saw this on Shark Week,” after Ron prepares an appetizer of T-bone and dynamite. 

At the height of the tension, Hounsou gets the groan-worthy task of pausing the action long enough to share his back story with a cocky TV newsman (Andrew Lees), tracing his fascination with sharks to a near-fatal hippo attack in Mozambique, when a pair of ferocious bull sharks intervened just in time. Kudos to the actor for delivering those lines with a straight face.

Nothing in Thrash is going to wow Steven Spielberg, and its adherence to plot logic is elastic to say the least. But as bloody, dumb shark thrillers go, it stays afloat, gaining some credibility from the natural disaster element. Compared to shark survival stinkers like The Requin with Alicia Silverstone or The Black Demon with Josh Lucas, it’s more than passable.