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The Devil's Mouth -- a review

Would you swim in a place called The Devil’s Mouth? A bunch of dipshits young thrill seekers do exactly that. Led by Maxine (Lana Condor; To All The Boys), the group’s unofficial pleasure coordinator, a group of flaming morons college students, not satisfied with already vacationing in Thailand, decide to go exploring a network of underground freshwater caves with a local guide named Wat (Tayme Thapthimthong; The White Lotus). Despite the fact that sharks only like the salty ocean, they all encounter a bull shark in the deep waters of the caves, through which they must swim, because they couldn’t at least have made this trip on a boat—oh no, that would have made too much sense.

The Devil’s Mouth isn’t a truly terrible film, but it’s far from being a good one, as well. It’s the type of annoying “thriller” where the characters act so stupidly that you’re reduced to just waiting (and hoping) for the shark to pick them off, one by one, which it does (and thanks, bull shark—seriously, I appreciate it). The shame of it is that it starts pretty decently, giving the viewer hope that it might be an unconventional shark movie that’s actually halfway intelligent, until the film gets into the caves and its IQ drops like an anchor. The film’s lead, Kathryn Newton (Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, Abigail), is extremely engaging, but even her charms aren’t enough to float this flick upwards to being at least a fun B-movie, or even an ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’ flick.

Part of the problem, aside from the sheer stupidity of its characters, is the location itself. It’s literally too dark, to the point where you can barely make out what’s happening from scene to scene. I understand that it’s supposed to be an underground cave system, and they’re not usually very brightly lit in real life. But this isn’t real life, it’s a fictional story told within a film. You can suggest darkness while still enabling the viewer to see what’s going on. For instance, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, which also took place in an underground submerged cave system, ably managed to let the viewer see what was happening, sometimes using a stab of light to reveal one of its sharks in a shock moment. Any notion of suspense or terror is lost in The Devil's Mouth (did I just write that?) when you’re struggling to just make out what the shapes are in a scene that’s severely underlit.

Another weird thing that wound up distracting me from the story was the fact that the flippers on the feet of the swimmers kept randomly appearing and disappearing. At one point, just when it looked like the characters had ditched their flippers (they weren’t carrying them), the flippers just reappeared again later without explanation. And this submerged cave had many spacious places where the characters could get out of the water. Why didn’t they just stay out of the water? Why keep going back in with the shark? Speaking of which, the bull shark was created using CGI (or AI?), and it looks very fake in how it moves and behaves, which also undercuts any suspense. But I digress. Now excuse me while I rinse thoroughly with the devil’s mouthwash. --SF

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