Back in 2020, director Jeff Wadlow blazed a boring trail for destination vacations masquerading as feature films. Where most of those movies are either rom-coms subsidized by the tourism board of wherever they’re set, or Adam Sandler comedies filled with people he’d be hanging out with off-camera anyways, Fantasy Island took horror to the tropics. It was terrible, but at least it was a mix of genre and locale we don’t often get. For this year’s Shark Week, the purveyor of Blumhouse schlock like Truth Or Dare and Imaginary makes his first straight-to-Amazon film, The Devil’s Mouth, which once again has more to offer its cast (a financed getaway) than its audience (a boring CGI creature feature).
Yet, because of the particulars of the plot, even the actors probably didn’t have too much fun with this thing. They seem to have spent most of their time like the stranded soccer team dramatized in Thirteen Lives: stuck in a dark, muddy, flooded Thai cave awaiting rescue. But the only thing coming for this ensemble—a slasher’s worth of hot-blooded (or at least blood-filled) undergrads—is an unconvincingly animated bull shark stuck in the same submerged cave system.
It’s a claustrophobic premise, one that earned Aja Gabel and Myung Joh Wesner’s script a place on the Black List back in 2019, sunk like an anchor by its limp characters and Wadlow’s lifeless filmmaking. It should be fun watching this friend group get torn apart in this aquatic labyrinth, but the characters seem disinterested not only in their predicament but in their own barely written lives. “I just accepted that job,” declares Kathryn Newton’s responsible Sara in a moment of character-establishing conversation, “the one I worked really hard to get.”
Sara—aside from being the only one with a brain in her head—is the single one of the group, which means she’s going to be the survivor; the others are coupled up: overbearing party girl Max (Lana Condor) and the gormless James (Nico Hiraga), and the vapid lovebirds Greg (Gavin Casalegno) and Adrienne (Tommi Rose). Though Max finds some specificity in being Sara’s BFF, with some of the intimate contentiousness that implies, the rest of the group splits a single personality between them. They all speak in the same dialect of embarrassing quips and blunt exposition, volume making up for substance. The poor shark must feel like it’s opened a bag of chips, only to find that it’s mostly air inside.
The tourists head towards their cavebound doom guided by local Wat (White Lotus‘ Tayme Thapthimthong), whom they immediately overrule in order to take the more difficult path through The Devil’s Mouth. Wat’s the one who sets up the movie’s major plot devices: An unseasonable monsoon storm has pushed sea critters into the now-brackish system (like, maybe, a shark), the rocks are sharp as hell, the cave itself is surprisingly fragile, and the tunnels are a nightmarish maze that all looks the same. In other words, please don’t screw around so much, you Ugly Americans. Alas, poor Wat, that’s all they know how to do.
Some of these shenanigans might make the inevitable deaths of these kids more satisfying if The Devil’s Mouth wasn’t so hard to look at. Water and wall, monster and murk blur together in the brown-gray dark, free from any of the practically-motivated thrills of light and space that enliven a film like The Descent. This film, which cribs a weirdly out-of-place moment from Neil Marshall’s mean-hearted ending, can neither build suspense or unleash spectacle. While we’re told that merely navigating the water threatens to draw blood (and therefore attract the shark), there’s nothing tangible about the hazardous waters, nor is there any coherent sense of geography once the group is good and lost in the caves. The addition of a bad Indiana Jones-style map overlay is just goofy. Similarly, the only thing the shark attacks manage to evoke, unintentionally, is a Sam Raimi-like humor—the first to fall is grabbed by the shark and pinballed around the stalagmites, the indignity enhanced by a brief shark-POV shot. But even this lacks the gleefully bloodthirsty overkill of this year’s Send Help; though The Devil’s Mouth is going straight into the streaming heap, it’s protected from ever getting too nasty by a PG-13 cage.
It doesn’t help that the actor we spend the most time with, Newton, can’t seem to shake the hint of a smirk from her face. It’s not that she thinks she’s better than the material (though she is; it’d be hard not to be), but that she’s on screen for such long and loosely edited passages that she struggles to hide how silly it all is. There’s a version of this film that revels in the chumming of its himbo frat boys and entitled rich girls—a more nimble, knowingly goofy shark thriller that doesn’t tread water for 104 minutes. As is, though, The Devil’s Mouth does the dead man’s float for so long that it all but beckons you to over-consider its stupidity. Why, for example, would a shark stop going after the thrashing legs of its prey in order to investigate a flare that was lit in the air behind it? This isn’t a Jurassic World dinosaur, genetically modified to fit into a bad blockbuster, but an animal we’re supposed to believe exists.
Wadlow has proven that he has the range to make both clumsy horror that accidentally operates as comedy and clumsy comedies that fail to lampoon horror. The Devil’s Mouth, with its grating dialogue and doggy-paddle pace, is the former. Not only is it a bad movie, it seems like it was a bad vacation.
Director: Jeff Wadlow
Writer: Aja Gabel, Myung Joh Wesner
Starring: Kathryn Newton, Lana Condor, Nico Hiraga, Gavin Casalegno, Tommi Rose, Tayme Thapthimthong
Release Date: July 29, 2026 (Prime Video)
Keep scrolling for more great stories.