Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Tommy Wirkola
Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Djimon Hounsou, Alyla Browne
If the premise of Thrash sounds familiar you might have run across the movie when it was announced back in 2024 under its original title "Beneath the Storm." Or perhaps in 2025, when it was retitled "Shiver" and set for a theatrical release in August of that year. Now the movie has been renamed once again and its cinema release scrapped. Sony have sold it off to Netflix, who have dumped it on their platform with all the ceremony of an unwanted goldfish being flushed down a toilet.
It's more likely that Thrash's premise sounds familiar because it's essentially a knockoff of Alexandra Aja's fun 2019 creature feature Crawl. That movie saw a Florida coastal town flooded, with alligators unleashed in the midst of the disaster. Thrash swaps out alligators for sharks, but Norwegian writer/director Tommy Wirkola fails to generate any of the thrills of his French counterpart.
Taking its cues from the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970s, Thrash introduces distinct groups of characters, cutting between their various predicaments throughout the movie. When a storm sees the town of Annieville flooded, the rising tides are the least of the worries of those who failed to get out in time. The water has brought with it a shoal of hungry bull sharks, attracted by the offal from a nearby meat processing plant. There's also a Great White thrown in for good measure. The sharks are being tracked by Marine Researcher Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou, whose character hails from Mozambique yet is somehow named "Dale Edwards"), whose agoraphobic niece Dakota (Whitney Peak) is trapped in her submerging home in Annieville.
Star power comes courtesy of Phoebe Dynevor, who must be royally pissed that her shot at headlining a summer blockbuster has resulted in her being relegated to Netflix once again. The English actress plays the heavily pregnant Lisa, who gets stuck in her car when a tree collapses. The incident happens just across the street from Dakota's home, and Lisa pleads for the teen to come and rescue her. At this point any sympathy I had for Lisa when out the window. Girl, you could have left town earlier and avoided this; now you're ordering a teenage girl to risk her life to save your ass?
Another subplot is focussed on a trio of orphans (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, Dante Ubaldi) who resemble refugees from a Mark Twain story. When their hilariously villainous foster father (Matt Nable) refuses to leave town because "it's just weather," they find themselves marooned in their home as sharks swirl outside.
The two main subplots could be standalone movies in their own right, and given their tonal differences, maybe they should have been. The Dynevor storyline is played relatively straight in the Crawl mode, and the imminent birth adds an extra layer of jeopardy. The orphans plotline is far more comedic, and Wirkola's sub-Sam Raimi style is far more suited to this strand. At one point he even directly nods to Evil Dead 2.
There are a couple of clever touches on Wirkola's part that almost elevate Thrash from your run of the mill straight to streaming shark thriller. He uses an ironic needle drop in particularly brilliant fashion, and there is an edge of your seat shot of a shark illuminated by a character's torch as it swims between their legs.
But all of Thrash's problems come from a script that can't decide if it wants to take itself seriously or play this setup for laughs. Dakota's agoraphobia and dead parents are symptomatic of the modern horror trend of lumbering a protagonist with unnecessary trauma, as if it somehow makes the character more interesting. Dakota's trauma is completely irrelevant in this scenario. She's terrified of being eaten by sharks; her agoraphobia is the least of her worries.
Thrash also makes the fatal error of killing off its redshirts far too early, leaving us with a bunch of characters who are guaranteed to make it to the end. We know the pregnant lady, the cute orphans and the disabled teen aren't going to get eaten. If Thrash had been made in the '70s by some mad Italian, all bets would be off, but a mainstream American movie in 2026 just isn't going there.
Thrash is on Netflix from April 10th.
