Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor Battles Bull Sharks in Brutal Netflix Thriller

Picture Credit: Netflix

From Sony/Columbia Pictures & Producer Adam McKay (The Menu, Fresh), Thrash is the latest film from Norwegian writer/director Tommy Mirkola, whose penchant for hyperviolent action thrillers has been well established since his breakout Nazi zombie film Dead Snow in 2009. He has since gone on to create such brash & brutal creations as Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), the Netflix Original What Happened to Monday (2017), The Trip (2021), & the holiday home invasion crime thriller Violent Night (2022) starring Stranger Things David Harbor as a kick ass version of Santa. Mirkola will also helm the Violent Night sequel coming out later this year.

While he has notably dabbled in several genres, Mirkola will now set his sights on the burgeoning business of creature feature disaster films. Netflix had a recent international hit with the French shark thriller Under Paris in 2024, a film that spent 21 weeks in Netflix’s Global Top 10 that summer, amassing almost 110 million completed views. With Thrash, both Netflix and Mirkola himself will hope for more of the same success, especially with 2 stars of major Netflix projects in prominent roles this time around.

Featuring Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor & Rebel Moon franchise standout Djimon Hounsou, the story centers around the citizens of a small coastal town in South Carolina where an aggressive & catastrophic Category 5 hurricane brings torrential rain, flooding, debris, & darkness to the area. Citizens like Dakota (“Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” co-star Whitney Peak), a young woman battling panic attacks when she leaves her home after recently losing her mother, or Lisa (Dynevor), a pregnant woman recently left behind by her fiancé to pursue a career in professional poker and DJing (OOF!), are trapped to battle the massive storm surge and the ensuing chaos. However, among the devastation, those who remained behind will also have to take on one thing they never counted on: the arrival of a hungry pack of bull sharks bursting into town upon the destruction of the levee walls.

If the premise of a Cat 5 hurricane creating mass flooding in a coastal U.S. town leading to the emergence of aggressively violent predators being unleashed upon the area, you may be thinking of the 2019 Alexandre Aja natural disaster survival thriller Crawl; a film that boasted the tagline: If the storm doesn’t get you, they will. The “they” in that film was a group of alligators swarming around a young woman and her father as the floodwaters rose up around them in their family home.

While these two films have the basic outline of a similar plot construction, the main thing that separates them, and ultimately makes only one of them successful, is that only one of them had enough character & emotion to make the emergence of the frightening creatures MATTER. Unfortunately for Mirkola, Netflix, and possibly yourself, that “one” is not our shark-infested thriller.

Thrash has many of the elements of successful underwater creature features, but it doesn’t commit or strongly execute any of them. It has some comedic parts (Deadbeat Foster Dad turning on the country music radio in his truck as he gets eaten for example), but it’s not a goof like Sharknado or the dark campiness of a Lake Placid. It has some violent attacks, but it’s not scary or intense like Jaws or Crawl. It has some touches of scientific basis or environmental concern, but doesn’t come off as a particularly smart film or a politically armed one. Worst of all, they have 3 separate storylines, multiple characters with no real lead, and no chemistry between any of them to create an emotion worth engaging in.

This may sound strange, but most creature features don’t rely on the creature to be the best part of their film. It’s what the characters have to lose and why we care that ultimately makes these films work. Thrash doesn’t give enough time or backstory to anyone here to make them interesting or compelling enough to care.

The film has de facto leads in Phoebe Dynevor’s Lisa & Whitney Peak’s Dakota, which are paired up after a rescue from a car accident in the floodwaters. A daring rescue, a dangerous situation, trauma bonding – this should be the building blocks of the best relationship in the film; however, Dakota is written to be so paralyzed by anxiety that she can’t hold a conversation and Lisa is so overwhelmed by the possibility of an impending birth that they only exchange exposition and basic strategy. Even during the aforementioned daring rescue in which Dakota puts her life on the line to save Lisa from drowning, Lisa merely says “ok” when she is pulled from being trapped in a flooded car and doesn’t say thank you until they are back in the house. No hugs, no emotion, barely any gratitude. Nothing.

The positives here merely lie in the appreciation of shark violence and survival techniques. You want lessons on distracting sharks and mimicking injured fish? You got it! You want people getting their arms ripped off? Got that too! Just don’t ask for a character with personality.

If your barrier for entry is that you enjoyed Under Paris but wish they didn’t have to read subtitles, then maybe, at a breezy 90 minutes, you could get enough from Thrash to get you to Shark Week this summer. But if you want it to compare to the more acclaimed movies of the disaster horror microgenre, then you may want to seek higher ground.

Watch Thrash If You Liked

Crawl
Under Paris
Deep Blue Sea
What Happened To Monday

MVP of Thrash

Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa

As noted in the review, no single character gets a real chance at backstory or personality in this one; but if anyone could get any acknowledgment, it has to be the one who has to give birth while drowning and being attacked by sharks, right? And also the one who has the best line in the movie:

“Mommy’s here! Mommy’s just gotta fight some fucking sharks!”

I truly enjoyed Dynevor in Netflix’s post Me Too finance thriller Fair Play from 2023, and I root for her success beyond this film.

Verdict: Lower those expectations below sea level if you want to enjoy this shark-infested survival film. Actors of note don’t mean much if you don’t give them anything to work with, but violent shark attacks might be enough to quench the bloodthirsty fans of the genre