“The Devil’s Mouth” (2026) proves that they do not make shark movies like they used to. Five American college grads vacation in Thailand and decide to visit the titular location, a freshwater cave system. Before they arrived, storms flooded the caves with ocean water and trapped a shark inside with them. Will they survive long enough to finally learn from the past and stop making mistakes? Not all of them of course. Unless you like looking at pretty people in gorgeous locations, you will die of boredom for a survival thriller movie without thrills.
Max (Lana Condor) is the group leader who likes doing things her capricious way, but when the consequences of her decisions start boding poorly for others, she ducks responsibility and desperately looks for a way to shift blame as if accountability will kill her. Her best friend, Sara (Kathryn Newton), the protagonist, is the first to bear the brunt of this lesson but is a slow learner and reluctant to stand up for herself and strike her own path independent from Max because of their bond forged when Max helped Sara get through devastating times. If you are familiar with Newton’s work, you may be aware at how gifted she is in comedy, but here they put her in a standard issue good girl slot which she takes grimly seriously as if she is doing an impression of a tough guy in a similar movie. “The Devil’s Mouth” basically won the lottery with Newton then left money on the table. Newton does great in action and has some memorable badass lines, but she has such a wide range and can do kookiness that it seems like a waste.
The momentum of “The Devil’s Mouth” depends on Sara truly graduating and commencing her life independently from Max, and Max finally paying a long overdue tab. Sara is clearly the one to root for because she wears the most clothes, has brothers and is not boo’d up, but if the story was honest, none of them would be there if she was not trying to follow her father’s footsteps, so all four are actually pretty good friends. A nice feature is that the film does not become a romance, and fellow tourist, Australian Ryan (Harrison Luna), does not end up getting paired with Sara. Maybe if the story was just about the two best friends, there could have been more nuance, and a chance for the two lead actors to flex their respective acting muscles, but there are more people in the cast so the shark could have some food on the way to the denouement. A better movie would have used the characters as more than chum. Adrienne (Tommi Rose), nicknamed Ade, had a lot of potential as Sara’s one good friend who clues her in (and the audience) to the problematic dynamic between the two, but she is still an enabler of Max’s shenanigans.
Two of the friends bring their boyfriends. James (Nico Hiraga), Max’s boyfriend, gets better lines and a chance to stretch himself dramatically when he is the last man swimming. Hiraga proves that if he was trusted with more, he could deliver. His last lines are quite moving and poignant. He kills it and may have given the best emotional performance. Greg (Gavin Casalegno), Adrienne’s boyfriend, is the comic relief without the laughs, but he does successfully have an occasional sweet boy moment. He is so forgettable as the first onscreen victim. The mild rivalry/friendship between the two men so fails to register that if it was on a heart monitor, it would be declared dead on arrival.
“The Devil’s Mouth” is the kind of movie where you start rooting for the shark so the movie can end sooner. Also, there is a scene when the friends are swimming under water in a tunnel still visible, and the shark tries to get in to get food. Go, shark! The kills are just too far and few in between then when it happens, it usually lacks personality. One second the person is there, the next they are not. It is too rapid. The denouement scenes are the best, but by then, most viewers are going to be checked out and not invested. There are other dangers that are not on the marquee (jagged rocks, cave collapse), but cowriters Aja Gabel and Myung Joh Wesner do not yet understand how to string out the pacing for a survival thriller because it is their feature debut. Somebody toss some Seventies disaster movies in their general direction so they can learn from the best of the best.
Because it is cheaper than a plane ticket, “The Devil’s Mouth” is worth it if you ever wanted to visit Thailand and party on your imaginary wealthy family’s dime with your friends. Your living room is as close as you can get. Most college students are not ballers like them. It is unlikely that this cave and the story connected to it are real, but it would have been cool for the nerds in the audience to learn more about the region. Sahajak Boonthanakit gets a bit part as a captain at the beginning of the movie, but he had more to do in the super popular in “The Furious” (2025) as the gangster with a cowboy hat. Tayme Thapthimthong, who is actually British, plays Wat, the cave tour guide. This movie could have been awesome if he survived after deciding to align with “I Gotta Put Me First Lucious!” It was the most unique aspect of the story.
Director Jeff Wadlow visually continues this adventure tourism theme using a map to show the progress of the friends’ escape. While the daytime, exterior shots make Thailand seem like a paradise, if viewers need a map to orient the characters’ location, and it is not obvious while watching it, the location needed more work if it is not organic. Home viewers are required to rely too much on the dialogue to know what happened. There is a sameness to the caves regardless of the features that Wat describes. “The Devil’s Mouth” is the kind of movie that you may find yourself multitasking during not because you should not be looking at it, but when you do, there is not anything to keep your attention.
“The Devil’s Mouth” makes “Deep Water” (2026) seem like an epic. If you adore anyone in the cast, then check it out, but consider yourself warned that it feels like a complete waste of time with its archetypical characters, scares that aspire to be mid and a gorgeous destination limited to the first act. Even if streaming this movie costs zero dollars, time is priceless. The lesson about detaching from toxic leadership and relationships is valuable, but it needed a better environment and more engrossing movie to showcase it.
