Starring Kathryn Newton, The Devil’s Mouth is the latest in a small yet growing genre of films where sharks swim into confined spaces… It must be something in the water. Just about everyone’s making killer shark movies, it seems, with this year alone seeing the release of The Bay, Deep Water (directed by Deep Blue ... The Devil’s Mouth, now on Prime Video, is the latest entry in the sharks-in-tight-spaces subgenre
Starring Kathryn Newton, The Devil’s Mouth is the latest in a small yet growing genre of films where sharks swim into confined spaces…
It must be something in the water. Just about everyone’s making killer shark movies, it seems, with this year alone seeing the release of The Bay, Deep Water (directed by Deep Blue Sea’s Renny Harlin) and 47 Meters Down: The Wreck and probably more besides. But with this preoccupation with the sea’s alpha predators comes a curious additional subgenre: what I’m going to call the sharks-in-tight-spaces variant of B-movie.
In 2024, we got the straight-to-Netflix madness that was Under Paris, in which sharks swam up the Seine to create all manner of chaos. In April this year, we got Thrash, in which a coastal town was flooded and a shoal of bull sharks decided to move in. Director Tommy Wirkola evidently had a lot of fun thinking up ways for the sharks to menace people in kitchens, bedrooms and the front seats of their own cars. It was utterly ridiculous, but also a perfectly entertaining way to spend a Tuesday night in.
(As for why there are so many shark movies around now, I have a few theories: producers chasing trends; digital cameras making underwater photography cheaper than it was in the Jaws era; and the reality that sharks look really eye-catching on streaming service thumbnails.)
Now (as part of ‘Shark Week’) comes Prime Video’s entry in the fins-in-tight-spaces genre, The Devil’s Mouth.
It’s bull sharks again (“Ah yes, the hyenas of the ocean,” to quote Thrash’s Djimon Hounsou), though this time they’re terrorising clueless young holidaymakers on a caving expedition in Thailand.
I’ll be honest: I was sort of hoping the villains of the piece would be something other than sharks. The title, synopsis and thumbnail don’t make the nature of the film’s threat all that obvious (though there are shark fins all over the poster). Meanwhile, an early scene sees Kathryn Newton’s Sara, left stranded at sea by her friends as they speed off in a rented boat, repeatedly stung by jellyfish.
It’s such an effective moment that I began to wonder whether the whole film would essentially be picturesque 20-somethings versus Portugeuse Man o’ War. After all, there have been vanishingly few killer jellyfish movies; the only one I could find was 1966’s Sting Of Death, which apparently has a title pop song by Neil Sedaka called Do The Jellyfish.
Unfortunately, The Devil’s Mouth doesn’t have an opening pop song by Neil Sedaka, and the bit with the stinging jellyfish is designed to set up the friendship dynamic that turns a sunny holiday into a bloodsoaked nightmare.
For the most of the film’s grim events, we have Max (Lana Condor) to thank. An ambitious millionaire’s daughter, she’s Sara’s best friend and, among the wider holidaying group, the self-appointed ‘CEO of fun’.
I don’t know about you, but I’d run a mile from anyone who gave themselves a title like that, and frankly, Max’s friends would have been advised to get the next plane home.
For what it’s worth, Sara and Max’s circle of chums are Adrienne (Tommi Rose), who has no discernible backstory, and a pair of buff dudebro dopes, Greg (Gavin Casalegno) and James (Nico Hiraga). The group does all the usual carefree-people-on-holiday stuff we see in the opening act of movies: drinking, skinny dipping, jumping up and down and cheering, ‘Wooo!’ at nothing in particular.
Immediately, though, we get a flavour of Max’s almost sociopathically controlling behaviour. She uses her skills of superficial charm and manipulation to secure a luxury boat tour – nothing wrong there, you might think. But then, when Max lets the tour guide steer the boat back to shore with her best friend left swimming in its wake, she tries to blame everyone else but herself. When, over dinner, Sara gently suggests that it might have been Max’s fault, seeing as though she’s orchestrating every last detail of the trip, Max doesn’t apologise, but instead storms off in a huff.
Sara, it should be pointed out, is absolutely covered in livid welts from all those jellyfish stings by this point. Yet Max still books everyone in for an underwater caving expedition the next day, not even appearing to think that Sara might, you know, need a day to rest up.
That’s not all: when they get to the cave, tour guide Wat (Tayme Thapthimthong) shows a huge map offering two routes: one marked in green, which he says is safe for beginners. The other is marked in red, which he says is dangerous and in any case shouldn’t be tackled because it was recently flooded with seawater. Max immediately begins demanding that everyone, including Wat, must agree to go on the red route. With her injured best friend.
In a cave called Devil’s Mouth.
You can probably piece together what happens from here: the flooding Wat mentioned saw a bull shark unceremoniously dumped in the cave a few days earlier. And now it’s there, stranded, just waiting for some idiot tourists to come swimming by.
Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Truth Or Dare, Imaginary), The Devil’s Mouth is a reminder of how difficult it is to make an entertaining B-movie. Thrash, for all its many flaws, was made with a 90s-style sense of self-awareness; the sharks ended up in the coastal community of Annieville in the first place because a juggernaut filled with pigs’ blood broke open in a storm. A film with a set-up like that is never going to be accused of taking itself too seriously.
The Devil’s Mouth, written by Aja Gabel and Myung Joh Wesner, shoots for a more serious tone – well, as serious as you can be when you have a bull shark sniffing around a cave system (“They can survive in both fresh and salt water!” one of the dudebros helpfully explains).
Anyone who’s seen enough of these sorts of films will probably be able to figure out which order the characters will be eaten in before they’ve even entered the first watery chamber. But just as damagingly, The Devil’s Mouth has been shot in murky DigitalVision (patent pending) which means we’re constantly squinting to see what’s going on. Was that a stalagmite? Was it a shark? Oh, it’s just some dust on my screen.
In all likelihood, The Devil’s Cave may have looked better in a cinema. But run through a streaming service’s compression algorithm, and funnelled through a domestic LED TV, it has all the clarity of London smog.
It’s common to use the brilliance of Spielberg’s Jaws as a stick to beat these modern shark movies with. A fairer comparison is probably Jeanot Szwarc’s Jaws 2, in which the Great White is turned into a scar-faced slasher who hunts whiny teenagers who wear bell bottoms. In this respect, Jaws 2 is probably just as influential as Spielberg’s film, since so many other B-movies have borrowed its open-waves slasher format, with young, good-looking characters rather than the original Jaws’ boatload of middle-aged men. Certainly, the youthful players of The Devil’s Mouth more closely resemble the cast of Jaws 2. One character’s bludgeoning fate is also strikingly similar to one in Szwarc’s 1978 bite-fest.
While the shocks are derivative, what just about keeps the film going is the dynamic between Sara and Max – though even this might not be for the reasons the filmmakers intended. In theory, they’re two friends with opposing personalities: Sara is inassertive and cautious, Max is domineering and impulsive.
It’s screenwriting 101 to have the two characters learn something from each other and come through the ordeal as better people; Sara more willing to be bold and live a little, Max now able to listen and think before she makes a decision. But Max ends up making so many obviously bad choices, and causes so many calamities, that it quickly becomes difficult to sympathise with her character. We might even, in our darker moments, begin to ask ourselves where that damn shark’s gotten to, already.
The Devil’s Mouth is the lesser of the sharks-in-tight-spaces flicks we’ve seen so far, then. It doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first cave shark film: Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down: Uncaged came out all the way back in 2019. And if you want a cave-diving horror that doesn’t contain sharks, but absolutely is lit so you can see what’s going on, I’d heartily recommend Neil Marshall’s The Descent from 2006.
Still, while The Devil’s Mouth isn’t a great film, it isn’t without the odd jolt of tension here and there. And it’s also useful as a cautionary reminder that self-appointed ‘CEOs of fun’ are more dangerous than any shark.
The Devil’s Mouth is streaming now on Prime Video.
