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.
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…
