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The Devil's Mouth Had a Genuinely Good Premise, But Completely Wasted It
- Sakshi D
- 6 minutes ago
- 4 min read
A shark movie that's too scared of its own concept
Every summer without fail, Prime Video drops a shark movie (I think?) and every summer I am right there watching it despite knowing better. The Devil's Mouth caught my attention specifically because of the cast. Lana Condor, who I absolutely love from To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and Kathryn Newton, who I adored in Supernatural, both in the same survival horror film set in underwater caves in Thailand?
The premise is promising. Sharks in a freshwater cave system is a different enough angle that it could have worked. It really could have. And then I watched it and spent the entire runtime waiting for it to actually go somewhere.
The setup is this: five college friends on a Thailand trip decide to explore the Devil's Mouth, an underwater cave system. A storm the previous week pushed ocean life into the freshwater caves. Most of it died, but ofc, the bull shark did not. The group gets trapped inside, the shark starts picking them off, and the friendships start fracturing under pressure.
Specifically, Sara, played by Kathryn Newton, is still carrying serious resentment towards her best friend Max, played by Lana Condor, after Max left her behind on the boat earlier in the trip and she ended up covered in jellyfish stings. This is a solid setup for interpersonal tension inside a survival horror situation, but the film just doesn't know what to do with any of it.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know
The jellyfish scene that opens the film is well executed and sets up both the dynamic between Sara and Max and the stakes of what this trip means. It's tense in a way the rest of the film rarely manages to replicate. The opening scene is doing so much right that it almost tricks you into thinking you're about to watch something good.
Kathryn Newton as Sara is the strongest thing in the film. She's quieter than you'd expect from her given how she usually plays very outward dynamic characters, and that restraint works here. She's resourceful and watchable, and you root for her in a way you don't quite manage for anyone else. The physical work she puts in, most of this film is actors treading water delivering dialogue- is impressive and more than the material deserves.
The cave setting has real potential, and there are a handful of shark attack sequences that deliver enough chaos to keep you watching. The bull shark throwing itself out of the water and slamming into people against rocks is also kind of fun.
Where It All Falls Apart in The Devil's Mouth
The film is rated PG-13, and it shows. This is a survival horror movie about a shark eating people in an enclosed cave system, and it is aggressively bloodless. For a genre that lives and dies on its kills, The Devil's Mouth is deeply squeamish about the thing that should be its entire personality. I kept waiting for the gore, and it kept not arriving.
The shark takes people out, and then the film cuts away before anything remotely satisfying happens. It's like watching a horror film with the horror carefully edited out. Read Predator Badlands 2025 Movie: Found Family Finds Great Footing
The survival mechanics are also weirdly absent for a survival movie. Sara figures out some patterns in the shark's behaviour and the film gestures at her being clever and resourceful but never fully commits to showing us her working through the problem the way a good creature feature should.
The Descent, which this film is very obviously trying to be a cheaper version of, works because you believe those women are genuinely skilled and then watch them fall apart under pressure. Here the characters mostly just tread water, argue, and wait for the shark to show up again.
Lana Condor's Max is written so relentlessly insufferable that by the midpoint I had completely given up on the character. Every decision she makes is wrong. Every instinct she has is bad. The film wants you to understand where her control issues come from but never does the work to make you feel it, so she just reads as annoying for the entire runtime. Condor is clearly trying, but the script leaves her nowhere to go.
The supporting characters exist purely to die, which would be fine if the deaths were memorable. They are not. Gavin Casalegno, who you might recognise from The Summer I Turned Pretty, is entirely wasted. Nico Hiraga gets one interesting character beat and then the film abandons it completely.
Director Jeff Wadlow, who also did Fantasy Island and Imaginary, has a specific brand of filmmaking that mistakes flatness for tension and this film is a perfect example of it. The cave setting should feel claustrophobic and suffocating. It feels like a production set. The lighting is murky in ways that just make it hard to see what's happening.
My Final Verdict: Should You Bother Watching It?
The Devil's Mouth is not aggressively terrible but it is deeply, frustratingly mid, which for a shark movie might actually be worse. It has an interesting premise, two leads with real charm, and a cave setting that should have created the kind of claustrophobic dread that makes survival horror work. None of those ingredients get used properly.
The gore is almost nonexistent for a film that needed to go hard on it. The character drama has no payoff. The survival mechanics are underdeveloped. And the whole thing is over an hour and 40 minutes of people treading water while the movie can't decide what it wants to be.
Watch The Shallows instead. Watch The Descent. Watch anything with a stronger commitment to its own concept. The Devil's Mouth had the bones, but it settled for being completely forgettable and that's the most disappointing outcome of all.
What shark movie would you put on instead of this? Tell me in the comments.
