THRASH Review

Netflix has made a habit of commissioning films that exist somewhere between theatrical ambition and streaming comfort food. Thrash, directed by Tommy Wirkola, lands squarely in that territory — a shark-disaster hybrid with genuine technical muscle and a script that keeps tripping over itself.

The premise is straightforward enough: a Category 5 hurricane devastates a fictional coastal town called Annieville, and the storm surge carries in something worse than floodwater. Hungry sharks. It's a lean, effective concept, and in the right hands it could have been something memorable. The execution, though, is a conversation between what this film wants to be and what it actually is.

A Setup That Earns Its Eye Rolls

The first act is where Thrash does the most damage to itself. Wirkola and his writers seem determined to establish emotional stakes through every shortcut available — phone calls where characters conveniently recap entire tragic backstories, a steady stream of TV and radio news reports spelling out the incoming storm's severity, and a teenager sitting down to watch old VHS home movies with a level of nostalgic reverence no actual teenager has ever displayed. The intent behind each of these choices is readable, and that's precisely the problem. Good character work doesn't announce itself.

There is a clear and deliberate attempt to sit alongside films like Jaws, Crawl, Twister, and The Day After Tomorrow. The influences aren't subtle, and Thrash doesn't quite reach the altitude of any of them. That's a high bar, to be fair, but when a film signals its lineage this openly, the comparison becomes unavoidable.

Where It Actually Works

Here's the thing — once Thrash gets out of its own way, there are stretches that genuinely deliver. The flooding sequence in the early going is visually impressive, and the production design around Annieville deserves real credit. The town feels constructed and lived-in, capturing that specific helplessness of a small coastal community swallowed by something it can't outrun. (The town name, "Annieville," is doing a little too much thematic heavy lifting, but that's a minor grievance.)

The visual effects hold up for most of the runtime. Some of the shark CG gets a little choppy as the film moves into its latter half, but it never reached a point that broke the immersion entirely. For a Netflix-scale production, the technical ambition here is worth acknowledging.

The film also makes an interesting tonal shift as it progresses — what begins as a creature feature starts folding into a survivor thriller and disaster movie. That transition isn't always graceful, but the tension sequences that come out of it are Thrash at its best. The scariest moments aren't the shark attacks themselves, which are formulaic and underdeveloped, but rather the quieter wading-through-water sequences where something could be anywhere beneath the surface. That dread, when the film commits to it, is effective.

The Cast, Performances

Djimon Hounsou is, as he almost always is, completely present in material that doesn't necessarily deserve him. He plays a shark expert racing to reach his stranded daughter in the flood, and he brings a weight and specificity to the role that the script doesn't earn on its own. He's the film's anchor, and that's not a backhanded compliment — it's a genuine one.

His daughter Dakota is played by Whitney Peak, a newcomer who is sufficient here. She handles the role adequately without distinguishing herself, and that's fine given where she is in her career. The harder conversation is about Phoebe Dynevor. I was genuinely impressed by her work in Fair Play a couple of years ago, and I wanted more from her here. As Lisa — a pregnant, soon-to-be single mother workaholic who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time — she's essentially the human embodiment of every cliché the film reaches for. That's a screenwriting failure more than a performance one, but the result is the same: a character that never takes shape, and a would-be emotional throughline between Lisa and Dakota that never lands the way the film needs it to.

The Verdict

Thrash is a mildly good time carried by strong technical craft and one reliably great performance. But there's a version of this film — tighter script, bolder choices, a willingness to push past the genre's safety nets — that could have been something worth talking about longer than the weekend it drops. What we got instead is competent, occasionally tense, and frequently content to coast. That might be enough for a Friday night watch. It just likely won't stay with you.

🍿 SCORE = 57 / 100