Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa in Thrash. —Ben King—Netflix
As a Category 5 hurricane devastates a small coastal town, flooding turns out to be the least of the residents’ worries when the rising water brings massive predators with it.
If you thought this was a reference to the buzzy 2019 alligator survival thriller Crawl, no one could fault you. But as of April 10, Netflix has a new creature feature streaming that just so happens to also fit that description: Thrash. Except this time around, the killer beasts in question are bull sharks rather than gators. And boy are they hungry for human flesh.
Written and directed by Tommy Wirkola (Violent Night, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), Thrash stars Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa, a newly single and heavily pregnant transplant to the South Carolina seaside who finds herself trapped inside her car in neck-deep water when the sharks show up. Fortunately, her car ends up right outside the home of Dakota (Whitney Peak), a local teen struggling with agoraphobia in the wake of her mother’s death who also failed to heed the hurricane evacuation warnings. Dakota must overcome her aversion to the outside world in order to rescue Lisa from drowning (or worse), leading to a fast friendship between the pair as they fight to survive the night.
Whitney Peak as Dakota in Thrash. —Netflix
Thrash has some tense sequences, including a scene in which a passerby attempting to free Lisa from her vehicle is brutally ripped to pieces by a rampaging shark and, as can be expected from a movie that drops an about-to-burst pregnant woman into a disaster scenario, a traumatic birth scene. It also offers up some moments of tongue-in-cheek camp, largely in the form of exaggerated one-liners like, “Mommy’s here. Mommy’s just gotta fight some f-cking sharks!”
But Thrash doesn’t lean far enough in either of these directions to distinguish itself in the extensive annals of shark movie history. If thrillers like seminal Great White blockbuster Jaws and inspired-by-a-true-story indie Open Water sit on the top tier of the horror end of the shark movie spectrum and pulpy B-movies like Sharknado and Deep Blue Sea on the over-the-top, so-bad-it’s-good end, Thrash falls somewhere in the unmemorable range of most SyFy channel originals.
This is perhaps due in part to Thrash being released on Netflix rather than in theaters as was originally intended. Shot back in 2024 and previously titled both Beneath the Storm and Shiver at various points in time, the Sony film probably would have benefited from the communal laughter and gasps of a theatergoing audience rather than the more solitary experience of streaming.
A frenzied shark swims toward Phoebe Dynevor’s Lisa in Thrash. —Netflix
Is Thrash worth watching?
However, despite its ultimate ineffectiveness,Thrash‘s attempt to thread the needle between indulgent guilty pleasure and serious drama is apparently what drew Hyperobject Industries producers Adam McKay and Kevin Messick to the project in the first place.
“We started this company with the idea that we are living in historic times,” McKay told The Discourse podcast. “There are stories that need to be told that aren’t a part of the traditional kind of Hollywood narratives. The whole mission of the company was to mash up genres, like a completely plausible scientific premise that then goes into the realm of absurdity.”
So if you’re still wondering whether Thrash is worth a watch while you’re sitting at home this weekend, simply consider how you feel about Messick’s synopsis of the movie’s appeal. “It’s grounded before it lifts off into Tommy’s kind of heightened craziness,” he told The Discourse. “I think there’s no one other than Tommy Wirkola that would have a woman giving birth in water with sharks, taking a piece of driftwood and cutting her own umbilical cord before delivering a one-liner.”
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