The Devil's Mouth: A Trivial Shark Movie
At the center of Jeff Wadlow's new film is a group of friends visiting a Thai cave, unaware that a ravenous shark lurks in its waters. On Prime Video.
Sara is in Thailand with her best friend Max and other university companions to spend a relaxing vacation in those paradisiacal places, before life leads them down different paths. Behind the facade of the party, however, there are frictions ready to emerge: between Sara and Max there is indeed a deep bond, but their differences in character have led them to argue many times. The situation escalates during a yacht party when Sara is forgotten in the open sea and attacked by a group of jellyfish, before her friends notice what happened and return to save her.
But for the unfortunate protagonists, the worst is yet to come. The following day, the group decides to venture into exploring a suggestive yet treacherous complex of submerged caves, known by the not-so-reassuring name of The Devil's Mouth. They will soon discover that a ravenous shark lurks in those waters, and their excursion will turn into a desperate fight for survival.
Into the Shark's Mouth
In recent years, cinema has offered us several titles where characters had to defend themselves from a shark in the heart of an isolated cave, with the claustrophobic setting adding to the already insidious threat lurking beneath the surface, in those shallow depths where death lies in wait. The Devil's Mouth is just the latest example and does little to distinguish itself, indeed falling into several clichés during its hundred minutes of viewing, starting with an overly stereotypical management of human relationships.
Right from the start, we discover how the focus is mainly on Sara, who will then prove to be the determining element for the narrative to come, alpha and omega while around her the various secondary figures, serving the accessory function of cannon fodder typical of the genre, begin to be devoured one after another by the scaly villain.
A Film That Doesn't Shine with Acumen
Certainly, intelligence does not shine within this circle of friends, and this is already evident in the prologue where Sara is calmly "forgotten" in the open sea with the risk of dying from a jellyfish attack, as if we were facing yet another reiteration of the Open Water franchise. But as the minutes pass, the levels of idiocy grow exponentially, with choices that are always and invariably wrong and a general level of recklessness that pushes our protagonists to go further and further, in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the consequences everyone expects.
Director Jeff Wadlow is a horror veteran, but while with the decent Truth or Dare (2018) he transformed the popular game into something pleasantly unsettling, with the subsequent Fantasy Island (2020) and Imaginary (2024) he showcased all his limitations. Limitations that are also reflected in The Devil's Mouth, a film poor in ideas and emotions, with predictable developments that lead the story to the only possible and widely anticipated epilogue. In this confused and often gratuitous mess, Kathryn Newton - seen among others in the Ant-Man saga and in Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019) - tries to give credibility to her character, but falls victim to clichés and contrivances, with an equally anonymous management of action dynamics and special effects.