Thrash (2026) Review — Netflix’s Hurricane Shark Thriller Is Dumb, Stressful, and Weirdly Fun

Is Thrash 2026 Worth Watching?

Honestly, that depends on what you want from a shark movie.

If you’re expecting prestige horror or some deep survival drama, Thrash probably won’t fully work for you. But if you’re looking for a fast-moving Netflix thriller with flooding streets, brutal storm chaos, and sharks tearing through a town during a Category 5 hurricane, there’s definitely some fun here.

The movie has been getting compared to Crawl online for obvious reasons. Both films throw ordinary people into a natural disaster and trap them with predators while everything around them collapses. The difference is that Thrash goes bigger and messier.

Sometimes that works.

Sometimes it absolutely doesn’t.

But even people criticizing the movie seem to agree on one thing: it’s rarely boring.

The pacing moves fast, the tension keeps escalating, and the storm atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting. Once the flooding starts and the sharks begin moving through the streets, the movie becomes pure survival chaos.

You can tell Netflix wanted this to become one of those “everyone talks about it for a weekend” thrillers.

And honestly, it kind of succeeds.

The Wins

• Djimon Hounsou easily gives the best performance in the movie as shark expert Dr. Dale Edwards. He brings real authority to the role without overplaying it. While everybody else is panicking, he feels calm, believable, and emotionally grounded in a way the movie really needs.
• The first 30 minutes are surprisingly effective. Director Tommy Wirkola builds suspense slowly before the sharks fully arrive, using storm warnings, rising water levels, damaged infrastructure, and pure anticipation to keep things tense.
• The flooding sequences look genuinely stressful. Watching entire streets disappear underwater creates a constant feeling that nowhere is actually safe.
• The movie understands how to use silence. Some of the best scenes happen before attacks, when characters are just listening to movement somewhere beneath dark water.
• The shark attacks themselves are brutal without becoming completely cartoonish.
• The runtime stays lean. The movie gets in, causes chaos, and gets out before audiences have too much time to overthink the plot holes.
• There’s a strong B-movie energy here that makes the whole thing pretty entertaining with a crowd.
• The hurricane setting gives the film a different vibe from most modern shark thrillers. The sharks almost feel secondary at times because the storm itself is already terrifying enough.

The Fails

• The movie occasionally takes its ridiculous premise way too seriously. There are moments where characters talk like they’re in an emotional disaster drama instead of trying to survive sharks swimming through flooded streets.
• Some of the dialogue feels thin early on, especially when the script is speedrunning character introductions before the hurricane fully hits.
• Lisa’s storyline pushes believability a little too far by the final act. The movie asks audiences to buy that a heavily pregnant woman who just went through extreme physical trauma can suddenly fight off a massive bull shark during the climax. It’s definitely meant to be a big crowd-cheering moment, but for some viewers it crosses the line into pure action-movie fantasy.
• Dakota’s character arc is emotionally understandable, but her decision to stay behind despite repeated evacuation warnings becomes frustrating after a while. The movie explains that losing her mother triggered severe agoraphobia and panic attacks, which makes her terrified to leave Annieville, but the script leans on that explanation so hard that some viewers may struggle with how long she refuses to escape while the storm keeps getting worse.
• A few emotional scenes don’t hit as hard as they could because the movie spends more time building survival tension than fully developing the supporting cast.
• The movie never fully decides whether it wants to stay grounded like Crawl or lean fully into campy shark-movie chaos. That tonal split is probably why reactions online have been so mixed.

Does the ending fully stick the landing?

Not completely.

But it delivers enough tension, destruction, and crowd-pleasing chaos to make the ride feel worth it — especially if you go into Thrash expecting a fun survival thriller instead of the next great shark movie classic.