Thrash

• Written and Directed by Tommy Wirkola
• April 10, 2026 (Netflix)

A coastal town faces a Category 5 hurricane along with some sharks when the local levee breaks.

On the surface Thrash sounds like Crawl but with sharks instead. Upon viewing what it becomes is a disaster movie with sharks that sounds like Crawl. That could ultimately be a distinction without a difference.

We have the usual desperate characters. A teenage girl still mourning the death of her mother whose life intersects with a pregnant woman abandoned by her fiancé and the young girl’s scientist uncle who serves to explain science stuff. Then there are the redneck siblings living with the white trash couple using them for a gubment check. Unlike other disaster movies, these two stories never cross.

At the minimum the two casts should have met and then separated again. Truth be told I don’t think they were even in the same geographic vicinity. These are visually two distinct areas with some travel time between them under optimal conditions from all appearances. I expected the stories to overlap but never the twain shall meet. It’s essentially two separate movies. Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), our pregnant lady, and Dakota (Whitney Peak) are a main storyline. There are more characters that connect there with that resolution capping off the movie.

The story of Dee, Ron, and Will (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ubaldi respectively) in its independence AND existence as the only other story has the smell of padding to make Thrash a movie. Separately neither is really that long. Together they approach 90 minutes.

Ron gets his sweater caught twice to twice get almost eaten by a shark before using dynamite and frozen steaks to blow up said shark. Frozen steaks? Really? Not sure why redneck foster parent Billy Olsen (Matt Nable) had explosives in the house other than that is what all rednecks keep next to the freezer.

Djimon Hounsou as Dr. Dale Edwards is the biggest name here but has very little to do beyond acting as the cavalry by getting a boat up to his niece and the occasional line to add menace. TV reporter Joe Sprinkle (Andrew Lees) who provides a truck to haul that boat became less annoying as the movie went on getting to almost likeable. He was focused on making a bigger career move but never became irritating because of that.

There is some okay gore but much more red water. The general special effects aren’t bad but some of the CGI can be dodgy. A nice family moment closes out the movie with the boat and/or the scenery behind Dale and his niece looking quite fake in contrast to much of the flood imagery. Older tricks like sitting a boat on land while carefully angling the camera for harder shots are skipped for fake crap.

While I did mostly enjoy Thrash, there was not nearly as much danger for the characters as I expected. Survival was never really in doubt once the detritus was removed. No nips from a shark. Writer/director Tommy Wirkola should have built up a character or characters that looked poised for survival only to kill them. The cast in direct danger was too small to accomplish that. The script needed a few sacrificial lambs we could empathize with.

Because of the lack of dangerous moments, there’s not a lot here. It takes the dead space that should be about survival and replaces it with dialogue about the situation. It also means this movie has trouble getting beyond 90 minutes.

By the end, I didn’t think Thrash was a waste of my time Rather it passed the time and mildly entertained me. It’s not something I will probably check out again though.