The Devil’s Mouth review: New Prime Video survival horror leaves you rooting for the shark
Directed by Jeff Wadlow — who has significant experience in the slasher genre, having made movies such as Cry Wolf and Truth or Dare — The Devil's Mouth, much like its protagonists, loses its way and begins going around in circles.
A scene from The Devil's Mouth.
What if the endlessly affable characters of Manjummel Boys (a 2024 Malayalam survival thriller) were constantly bickering, entitled 20-somethings instead? Chances are, you’d begin to wish that the cave they’re trapped in swallows them whole before rescue services could be alerted. This is the central problem with The Devil’s Mouth, the new survival horror movie on Prime Video. Instead of rooting for its protagonists to make their way out of the mess they’re in, you kinda-sorta-maybe start rooting for their adversary — a lost bull shark in basically the same predicament as they are. Both parties cross streams one day after a series of events that are too boring to get into here.
Basically, we’re following a group of five American friends on a holiday in Thailand, during a day trip into one of those intricate cave networks where a youth football team got stranded in 2018. Ron Howard made a terrific movie about that world-famous rescue operation, which Elon Musk got publicly scolded for gatecrashing. Incidentally, Howard's acclaimed film — Thirteen Lives — is also streaming on Prime Video. It’s a far more enlightening and engaging experience than The Devil’s Mouth and far scarier, even though it isn’t a horror movie.
Wading in toxicity
The Devil’s Mouth primarily revolves around two characters, childhood best friends Sara and Max, played by the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor, the star of Netflix’s To All the Boys trilogy.
They have a deeply toxic relationship where one is clearly the leader and the other, unwittingly, the follower. The movie underlines just how bossy Max is at least three times in the opening act and then circles the idea with a neon highlighter for good measure.
In one early scene, Sara is left behind in the open sea when Max and the rest of their group simply take off on a boat, not realising that Sara isn’t with them. By the time they return, Sara has been bitten all over by computer-generated jellyfish.
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Sara is also contemplating moving to a new city, thousands of miles away from Max. Being attached at the hip with Max for years has clearly robbed Sara of her confidence. Max tends to have the final say on every decision, shared or otherwise. It is she who insists on taking the more dangerous cave path on the ill-fated excursion, against the advice of the group’s guide. It is she who rejects Sara's level-headed suggestions at every turn. The others simply do as they’re told.
Sara, on the other hand, appears to have resigned to the realisation that there is simply no reasoning with her. She just shrugs and goes along with the group. But when they get trapped in the caves with a shark, she decides to finally step up and take charge.
Crying ‘Shark’
The Devil’s Mouth is directed by Jeff Wadlow, not a name that would inspire much confidence if you’ve seen any of his past work. He does, however, have significant experience in the slasher genre, having made movies such as Cry Wolf and Truth or Dare.
The Devil’s Mouth can easily be the third in this unconnected trilogy of films, in which loud youths get killed off one by one in increasingly demented ways.
In fairness, the first hour of The Devil’s Mouth is quite effective. Once the group dynamics have been established and the stage set, the movie could have gone in several interesting directions. However, much like its own protagonists, The Devil’s Mouth loses its way and begins going around in circles. There was a reason, beyond the budget, why Steven Spielberg refused to reveal the shark in his classic film Jaws. And during the first hour of The Devil's Mouth, Wadlow wisely seems to be following in the master’s footsteps. However, the final act of the movie shows the shark in practically every scene. It’s far scarier to imagine a monster in the shadows, not knowing if the next moment could be your last, than it is to see it clearly 10 metres away and knowing that there’s a rock barrier between you.
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There is an unwritten law that for a shark movie to work, it has to have a level of self-awareness and satirical bite. Even the largely forgettable recent films Under Paris and 47 Meters Down had moments of goofiness that, at the very least, conveyed that they were on the same page as the audience.
The Devil’s Mouth, on the other hand, truly believes that it’s a moving portrait of a fracturing friendship when all it needed to do was deliver clever kill sequences and spotlight its plucky heroine. It does, but with a self-seriousness that betrays the B-movie it should have been. No film that opens with a shot of a monkey eating a bag of Doritos has any business being this sombre.
