Pairing aquatic predators with natural disasters is a time-honored tradition that includes precursors Crawl, Bait, and Sharknado before it. The latest, Netflix’s Thrash, sees a small Southern town trapped by raging floodwaters and ravenous sharks, a familiar premise made more tantalizing by the talent behind it: writer/director Tommy Wirkola (Violent Night, Dead Snow). The filmmaker injects his brand of camp horror fun into a serious eco-horror thriller, ensuring a lean feature that doesn’t overstay its welcome, even if a bit too familiar.
Thrash wastes not a second of its runtime, diving in immediately as the cozy town of Annieville, South Carolina, races to evacuate and brace for the incoming Category 5 hurricane mere hours from landfall. At the forefront of the scurrying residents are the agoraphobic 18-year-old Dakota Lewis (Whitney Peak), still reeling from the loss of her mother, and Lisa Fields (Phoebe Dynevor), an expectant mother held up by her job.
There are also orphaned Olson siblings Ron (Stacy Clausen, Leviticus), Dee (Alyla Browne, Sting), and Will (Dante Ubaldi), who are attempting to cope with their mistreatment by foster dad Billy (Matt Nable) as the flood waters rapidly rise. All quickly discover that the hurricane also swept in a shiver of aggressive bull sharks, along with a great white being tracked by marine biologist Dr. Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou).
After succinct introductions, Wirkola gets right to the goods, plunging Annieville into debris-filled waters and chumming up shark-infested waters with a tanker truck filled with meat paste. From there, Thrash tracks its characters to a hellish night of survival as they’re all trapped in their respective corners of town by the elements and vicious predators. But characters are a distant secondary to spectacle in Thrash.
The protagonists contending with personal dilemmas and nature’s threats are never fleshed out beyond their initial defining features and archetypes. They’re also prone to bad dialogue and cheeky one-liners, with Hounsou relegated to exposition deliverer. Still, Peak and Dynevor bring enough affable charm and steely nerve to instill rooting interest and keep us engaged, while Clausen and Browne manage to ground their wacky subplot with genuine underdog pathos, and with a more authentic southern drawl than most would endeavor.
Of course, the characters aren’t the selling point here, but the shark feeding frenzy amidst a Category 5 storm so powerful it earns wisecracks about the need for a Category 6 distinction. It’s here where Thrash truly impresses. Production designer David Ingram (“Raised by Wolves”, Crazy Rich Asians) crafts an impressive array of practical set pieces, particularly a knockout town square that serves as center stage for aquatic action and rising water levels. Wirkola stages the water-soaked action with an appropriate level of scale and blends VFX with practical and effective ways. The sharks not only look great, but Wirkola smartly avoids employing them as anything but opportunistic predators on the constant prowl.
It’s Wirkola’s amused sense of adventure and the stunning craftsmanship that elevate Thrash beyond its straightforward disaster movie meets shark thriller plotting. There are no real surprises here at all. It’s easy to predict who’s marked for shark bait and who will survive, though at least there’s no shortage of fodder. It’s also a bit restrained for a Wirkola film; the impulses to embrace the preposterousness of the shark carnage are often damped down by the serious environmental messaging. The tonal clashes prevent Thrash from reaching its full zany potential.
Still, there’s just enough of Wirkola’s trademark wacky weirdness to entertain and get Thrash to its over-the-top finish line. Netflix’s newest shark thriller may not stand out in an ever-crowded sea of shark horror movies, but it gets the job done.
Thrash is now streaming on Netflix.
