Critic Reviews

The character dynamics give The Devil’s Mouth a lot more bite than you’d expect from a straight-to-streaming shark movie. Wadlow stages the underwater horror with clarity, Newton and Condor sell a friendship that is both sustaining and suffocating, and the finale delivers the satisfyingly nasty payoff every shark thriller demands. Beneath the murky water, The Devil’s Mouth understands that sometimes toxic friendships can be just as scary as a hungry bull shark. In both cases, it’s usually best to get as far away as humanly possible.

In a glutted genre, The Devil’s Mouth offers a clever twist, a powerful setting and, through Sara, enough character transformation to give it a toehold in Joseph Campbell’s hero-journey territory. Which is pretty good for a shark film. More important, it’s great fun to watch.

What most most enlivens the film is how the horror of the predicament exposes the cracks in the central friendship. Dictating social plans above water becomes insisting dominance over life-or-death decisions in the caves and while the writing could afford to be far spikier and more consistent (Max is both in charge of every detail yet confesses that she is allergic to logistics), it adds extra gristle to the finale.

If the dialogue and characterization never rise above the pedestrian, however, those tensions do at least bring some malicious rooting interest to the essential survival drama — with a strain of toxic friction evident from the get-go between nice-girl protagonist Sarah (Kathryn Newton) and her narcissistic BFF Max (Lana Condor).

Newton and Condor have enough personality to make their characters more than just floating appetizers — though their power struggle doesn’t sharpen the stakes so much as it merely pads the running time.

It’s a good deal better than many shark movies that aim to trade off the success of one incredibly memorable blockbuster, but it’s still not the most riveting either.

In the end, “The Devil’s Mouth” commits the one sin no successful shark movie can afford: boredom. There is too little reason to care about these tourists, leaving only a survival story that Wadlow and his team fail to make compelling.

Wadlow has proven that he has the range to make both clumsy horror that accidentally operates as comedy and clumsy comedies that fail to lampoon horror. The Devil’s Mouth, with its grating dialogue and doggy-paddle pace, is the former. Not only is it a bad movie, it seems like it was a bad vacation.