Review: Netflix’s ‘Thrash’ Has Killer Sharks, but Little Bite
‘Thrash’ has the makings of an exploitative good time, but its incongruous goodwill never bloodies the waters quite as well as it should.
Alexandre Aja helmed Piranha: 3D and Crawl. Xavier Gens unleashed Under Paris. Now, international gorehound Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) hopes to unleash a Category 5 horror storm with Thrash, Netflix’s latest foray into aquatic horror. If we tiered the extreme horror auteurs’ dips into the water, Thrash would unfortunately be at the bottom of the chum bucket. It’s not bad, per se, but Thrash is regularly uninspired. It sinks when it should be swimming through the carnage.
The concept is more than the zeitgeist’s reductive “Crawl but with sharks” reaction suggests, at least. A coastal town is devastated by a horrific hurricane. Opening, expository text frames the subsequent onslaught as part of a series of extreme weather patterns this century, though the environmental nudge is just fluff—Thrash really doesn’t want to make any kind of statement about climate change being the real horror. It just wants a convenient excuse to send a cabal of bull sharks into a flooded town.
Unlike Crawl, which featured Kaya Scodelario in a principally one-woman show, Thrash is largely episodic. After a brief intro, the levy breaks, floods the town, and Thrash thrashes between three different scenarios: Djimon Hounsou’s marine biologist, pregnant Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), trapped in her Mini Cooper, and a trio of foster kids stranded in their living room.
No one is coming to Thrash for stellar performances, though the sheer talent often buoys the lackluster thematic bearings. Whitney Peak’s Dakota, an agoraphobic young woman whose story intersects with Lisa’s, manages investment despite being saddled with the requisite internal-trauma-matches-the-external-circumstances material. Djimon Hounsou is always welcome, but doesn’t break the horror trend of positively wasting the Oscar-nominee. He’s severely constrained in terms of screen time, appearing briefly in the opening and finale, and while not as egregious as his role in , I remain confounded by casting someone of his stature to do .
