*Spoiler Warning*
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Or perhaps it never was. Ever since Steven Spielberg made it appealing to tell stories about sharks in the water, everybody has been chasing the same dream: one day standing on top of Shark Mountain and saying, “I did it. I beat Steven Spielberg. I made a film greater than Jaws.” It’s literally impossible, and the hundreds of shark movies we’ve gotten since have proven that. The best you can hope for is to stand on your own as a great shark movie that sits somewhere behind Jaws, because in the grand ranking of shark films, Jaws is number one and everybody else is fighting for second place. Everybody except The Devil’s Mouth, because this isn’t the second-best shark movie by any stretch. Jeff Wadlow, the director behind Imaginary, Fantasy Island, The Curse of Bridge Hollow, and Kick-Ass 2, returns with another horror effort that sadly continues a run of movies that just don’t quite come together. I actually thought Kick-Ass 2 had the unenviable job of following Matthew Vaughn’s original and did a respectable enough job, but ever since then he seems to have been trapped in horror, and it just hasn’t been a particularly good fit.
The Devil’s Mouth stars Catherine Newton as Sarah and Lana Condor as Max, the only two characters who receive anything resembling meaningful development, backstory, or even enough screen time together to form an emotional connection. Catherine Newton has become something of a modern scream queen between Abigail, Lisa Frankenstein, and now Ready or Not: Here I Come, while Lana Condor remains best known for the To All the Boys films and also briefly played Jubilee in X-Men: Apocalypse. Man, does everything somehow come back to Matthew Vaughn? Anyway, the movie opens with a group of twenty-somethings partying aboard a boat off the coast of Thailand, celebrating life and talking about the future. Sarah ends up stranded in the water after the boat leaves without her, and that’s the exact moment the movie started sinking for me. I love movies. I don’t enjoy giving bad reviews. I’d much rather recommend something than tear it apart. Every film starts fresh with me until it gives me a reason to change my mind, and unfortunately The Devil’s Mouth wasted very little time doing exactly that.
The opening sequence is an absolute mess. It’s obviously meant to establish Sarah as a survivor, but instead it mostly establishes that her friends are complete idiots. Somehow they manage to leave one of their friends floating in the middle of the ocean without realizing she’s gone, and almost immediately she’s swarmed by jellyfish. Somehow these jellyfish drag her underwater, somebody eventually notices she’s missing, the boat magically returns in time, someone dives beneath the surface, rescues her, and she’s perfectly fine. I guess Sarah’s secretly a mermaid. That’s honestly the explanation that makes the most sense because later in the movie she spends another ridiculous amount of time unconscious underwater and survives that too. Is that the twist? Is The Devil’s Mouth 2 going to reveal that Sarah actually belongs to the ocean? Also, as someone who lives in Florida and has seen what jellyfish stings can do to people, they don’t just shrug these things off and head out on the next adventure. She wasn’t stung once. She was attacked by multiple jellyfish. Yet somehow she’s ready to go cave exploring almost immediately afterward.
That cave expedition is where the movie completely falls apart. The group hires a local guide who supposedly knows this cave system inside and out, warning everyone about unstable rock formations and how dangerous the terrain can be. So here’s my question. If this guy has been guiding tourists through this cave, shouldn’t he know what’s living inside it? Spoiler alert: it’s a bull shark. You already knew that because I told you this was a shark movie. Their first clues that something is wrong come when they discover dead fish, a dead bird floating on the surface, and an eel that’s been bitten clean in half but not eaten. Apparently this shark is killing seafood without eating it, yet later it launches itself out of the water like it’s auditioning for Free Willy and snatches a bat out of midair in one of the dumbest scenes I’ve seen all year. This shark ignores perfectly good food in the water but suddenly develops Olympic-level bat hunting skills? Come on. We’ve all watched enough Shark Week to know that’s not how this works.
To their credit, I actually liked Catherine Newton and Lana Condor quite a bit. They do everything they possibly can with characters who are at least given something to work with. Unfortunately, everyone else is little more than shark food. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many supporting characters there were because they’re so forgettable they basically exist to become a smorgasbord for the shark. One by one they disappear until only the important people remain, and then the screenplay suddenly decides it’s time to tell us about their personalities, hopes, dreams, and relationships right before they become dinner. It’s such a tired horror trope. If you want me to care when someone dies, you have to build that emotional investment beforehand. You can’t throw a collection of interchangeable characters into a cave and expect me to mourn people whose names I barely remember.
Naturally the film builds toward Sarah and Max becoming the final girls, carrying almost the entire last half hour by themselves. They work hard, and honestly they succeed more often than the screenplay does. Believe it or not, I have seen worse shark movies this year. Chum immediately comes to mind, and I skipped Water Park Shark and whatever bizarre Amityville shark movie somehow exists now because life is too short. So yes, as strange as it sounds, this may actually be the best shark movie I’ve watched this year. That’s less of a compliment than it sounds. It’s mainly because Catherine Newton and Lana Condor elevate material that frankly isn’t worthy of them.
A lot of people have commented on how claustrophobic the movie feels, and that’s completely fair. Watching these characters squeeze through impossibly tight cave passages does create genuine tension. But imagine if the movie had actually trusted that suspense instead of immediately revealing the shark. Deep Blue Sea understood this. That movie had a clear objective. The sharks wanted to sink the facility and escape. The humans wanted to stop them while surviving. The Devil’s Mouth boils down to a bunch of college-age kids wandering into a cave, realizing they made a terrible decision, and then trying not to get eaten. They never even discuss killing the shark so nobody else falls victim to it, probably because then they’d have to answer the obvious question of how an experienced cave guide somehow never realized there was a giant bull shark living in his cave.
The audio description is solid. I believe it was written by Brianna Leone for Media Access Group, and there are several moments during the third act where the descriptions become especially specific in ways I appreciated. Ironically, I completely believed Sarah was going to die during that opening sequence. I actually remember thinking, “Wow, they’re really killing off Catherine Newton in the first few minutes.” Then she survived, and instead of being impressed, I found myself wondering why the movie bothered staging such an absurd fake-out in the first place.
The frustrating thing is there’s a much better movie hiding inside this concept. Make it a cave thriller first. Let the audience slowly notice the dead fish, the bird, the mutilated eel, the increasingly unsettling signs that something isn’t right. Build the claustrophobia. Let the cave itself become the villain before the shark ever appears. Make us dread what might be lurking ahead instead of showing the monster almost immediately and turning the rest of the movie into a predictable slasher with fins. Rewrite Sarah’s opening scene so she survives because she’s resourceful instead of because the screenplay needs her alive. Give the supporting cast personalities and relationships that matter. Let the shark become the terrifying payoff instead of the entire premise from the outset.
That’s ultimately why The Devil’s Mouth disappointed me so much. There’s a stronger screenplay buried somewhere inside this idea. A tighter, smarter, more suspenseful thriller that earns its scares instead of simply throwing bodies into the water one after another. Instead, Jeff Wadlow approaches the material with the same lack of subtlety that’s plagued several of his recent horror films, hitting every beat with a hammer instead of letting suspense do the work. What we’re left with is streaming garbage that happens to feature two rising stars doing their best to save it. Catherine Newton and Lana Condor deserve movies worthy of their talent. This isn’t one of them.
Rotten: 5.3/10
