Quick Synopsis: A group of college friends on vacation in Thailand take a reckless detour into a remote underwater cave system and must fight for survival after becoming trapped with a ravenous bull shark.

I’m going to start this review with some praise. The opening does a fantastic job of establishing the characters very quickly. I haven’t seen such an effective introduction to a group of characters since the opening scene of Friends. I have many issues with that show, but go back and watch that opening scene: within minutes, you instantly understand EVERYBODY’s personality and sense of humour. It’s remarkably efficient.

I also like that this doesn’t immediately present itself as a survival thriller. It starts like a normal, fun movie. I love a good genre fake-out. People don’t live in genres, and I think films sometimes forget that. If you establish immediately that you’re watching a horror or survival thriller, audiences start questioning why characters are behaving like normal people. “Why’s she opening that door? There’s definitely a killer in there.” Whereas if you establish it as an ordinary day, you don’t question someone opening a door because, well, why would you? People open doors. That’s what doors are for.

Not gonna lie, I watched this almost entirely because of Kathryn Newton. She’s appeared in some of my favourite 7–8/10 movies of the last few years: Lady Bird, Three Billboards, Blockers, Freaky, Abigail and Ready Or Not 2. So I was pretty happy to see her attached. Then I looked at the director. Jeff Wadlow wrote Fantasy Island, Truth Or Dare, Imaginary and Bloodshot, and directed all of those except Bloodshot. The highest I regard any of those films is Imaginary, and even that is, at best, a 3/10 movie, with its biggest strength being that it doesn’t put enough effort into being actively shit.

The Devil’s Mouth (which is what preachers call a vagina) is not a bad movie. It’s definitely the strongest movie Wadlow has made in a while. But that’s damning with faint praise somewhat, because it’s not exactly good. It’s homoeopathic filmmaking; there’s nothing to it, and you’ll forget it soon after watching. Proof of this is that I watched it two weeks ago and yet it wasn’t even on my list of films to review. I just forgot to add it. I also made minimal notes while watching it; that’s how little there is to say about it.

The stuff I do remember? It’s not good. One moment in particular stands out. A character says, “That’s not the first time her tiny bladder has caused mayhem”, and then the film randomly cuts to a scene much later where people are fire dancing. Was the tiny bladder line really so necessary? It felt like a quippy on-set improvisation that somehow survived all the way through filming, editing and the final cut. Surely at some point, a seasoned director should have watched that back and thought, “We can probably lose the bit about the piss.”

As expected, Newton is fantastic; she always is. The score, composed by Bear McCreary, is better than this movie deserves. And the visuals are genuinely impressive. Wadlow knows how to shoot scenery in a way that makes you stop and admire it. The freshwater caves look incredible. Sadly, that’s the only fresh thing this film provides. Everything else is bland. The sharks have no aura around them whatsoever, to the point that you almost forget they’re even there for most of the movie.

And that’s a problem. There are sharks in this movie, but it never feels like you’re watching a shark movie. It feels like you’re watching a film where sharks occasionally make appearances. There’s no “holy shit, sharks!” It’s more “oh look, sharks again.” They never feel like they’re lurking somewhere, waiting for the opportunity to attack. It feels like they’re at home with their fins up, watching TV and waiting patiently for the film to tell them it’s time to come back.

The survival aspect doesn’t fare much better. There’s a decent premise buried underneath everything: people trapped in an underwater cave system while something very large and very hungry (a shark, not me) is swimming around them. That’s a concept that should basically write its own tension. But the film rarely does anything particularly interesting with it. The characters make the obvious decisions, encounter the obvious obstacles and survive the obvious near-deaths. It’s all perfectly functional, but nothing ever made me think, “Oh shit, how are they getting out of this?” More to the point, I didn’t particularly care if they didn’t.

And the characters, despite that excellent opening, don’t really get much more interesting once the film starts. That makes the opening almost frustrating in retrospect, because it proves the movie can establish characters efficiently. It just doesn’t do much with them afterwards. I knew who these people were within minutes, but by the end I didn’t particularly care about any of them beyond wanting them to survive because, well, they’re the characters in the movie.

There’s also a weird lack of escalation. A survival thriller should keep tightening the screws. Things should get progressively worse until you’re wondering how the hell anyone is going to get out. Here, the film feels strangely flat. It has danger, but it doesn’t really build dread. There’s a difference between “this is dangerous” and “I really don’t want to know what’s around that corner”, and The Devil’s Mouth rarely reaches the latter. Nothing ever feels like it leads to anything else. It’s not story progression, it’s just stuff happening.

Which is a shame, because there are flashes of a much better movie here. The caves genuinely look fantastic, the premise is solid, Newton is excellent, and that opening demonstrates that the writers know how to establish a group of characters without spending twenty minutes giving everyone tragic backstories. There are enough good ingredients here that I can understand why someone might have a good time with it. I just didn’t.

It’s not offensively bad. It’s not even particularly boring. It’s simply incredibly there. It’s a cinematic skirting board. You appreciate the craftsmanship, but it’s not something you pay attention to or remember once you’ve left the room. And considering this is a film about people trapped in a cave with sharks, “yeah, that was fine” is probably the least appropriate reaction it could possibly have inspired.

Kathryn Newton deserves better. Bear McCreary’s score deserves better. Those caves deserve better. The sharks deserve better. Jeff Wadlow deserves a mentor.

I suppose on the plus side, it is the best of the three shark movies I’ve seen this year (Thrash, reviewed here. And Deep Water, reviewed nowhere yet because I haven’t written it, I can’t review everything at once, get off my back). But again, that’s not saying much. Weirdly, all three have been direct-to-streaming. And there’s probably a reason for that.