Due to the sheer amount of money Netflix has to play with (last year it spent about $18bn on content) and the ever-increasing number of subscribers it must satiate, the streamer often acts as a home for the unwanted goods of others, a digital island of misfit toys. At one stage, the shark thriller Beneath the Storm was being primed for a theatrical release by Sony, shot back in 2024. The following year it was renamed Shiver and slated for an August premiere. Cut to 2026 and it’s now known as Thrash, unceremoniously offloaded to Netflix instead.

While this might not be the most encouraging Wikipedia description of a technically new film, it’s also not always a cause for concern. Back in 2018, David Ellison found Alex Garland’s stylish and scary sci-fi thriller Annihilation “too intellectual” so passed it to Netflix for the majority of international territories. In early Covid, Disney sold the unusually excellent Fear Street trilogy to Netflix. Just last year, Netflix saw its biggest hit to date with KPop: Demon Hunters, a film that had originally been intended for a Sony release. But Thrash is not a fellow exception to the rule; if anything, it acts as the very definition of what the rule usually is: a messily made, choppily edited and entirely misfiring cavalcade of bad decisions and dodgy accents. I just hope Netflix got it on the cheap …

One would surely assume so given how cheap the film itself looks. Often when Netflix does buy a real studio movie, even the worst examples will boast a well-lit gloss that separates them from the standard Netflix originals, chicken versus chick’n. But Thrash, which by the way is the worst of the three titles this film has had, looks like it could have been a Sharknado Week original movie for SyFy, far tinnier than what we have come to expect from a one-time theatrical play.

It has a distracting sense of inauthenticity from the very beginning, a film directed by a Norwegian and set in the US but shot in Australia with mostly Australian actors apart from a British lead who is playing American. It’s from writer-director Tommy Wirkola, whose work is usually known for its knowingly silly midnight movie disposability. He made the Nazi zombie horror Dead Snow and its sequel as well as the Santa action comedy Violent Night and the self-explanatory Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. The elevator pitch here is what if sharks but also disaster thriller, as a hurricane destroys a town while also thrusting a pack of bull sharks into the streets and homes of those unlucky enough to still be there.

It’s hugely reminiscent of Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, which spun the same premise but with an alligator, which was itself hugely reminiscent of Burning Bright, which used a tiger. It’s by far the least effective of the three and not just because sharks have become overused B-movie bad guys of late (in the last year, we’ve had Bikini Shark, Lone Star Shark, Beast of War, Into the Deep and the surprisingly sharp Dangerous Animals among many others) but mostly because Wirkola just doesn’t feel like the right director for the job. His films are largely tongue-in-cheek, prioritising big laughs over big scares, and without any real experience in the art of suspense or any real seriousness, he feels as adrift as his actors. We should be on the edge of our seat but every should-be set piece falls flat, the choreography always feeling a little off and the editing never works as tightly as it should (for a director who has also frequently revelled in gonzo gore, Wirkola’s shark attacks are lacking in anything really nasty enough to provoke a reaction other than a sustained boo).

Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor, whose last Netflix thriller Fair Play was unfairly underplayed, is stuck with a character so comically careless that it’s hard to spend much time fretting over what happens to her. She’s a heavily pregnant woman who has managed to avoid every warning to leave town until she’s left alone in her car when the flooding begins, on the edge of giving birth. Across the other side of town, a trio of “American” kids, played by clearly Australian actors, must outsmart circling sharks after their cruel foster parents are chewed up into bits. Meanwhile, Djimon Hounsou, an actor who so often deserves better than the low-level genre mush he’s given, is given shreds of laboured shark exposition as a marine biologist trying to save his niece.

Rather than the ensemble approach allowing for different forms of tension to escalate and add to our general sense of unease, it just takes away any of the clammy claustrophobia we could have otherwise felt if we stuck with one of the stories, an approach that helped Aja to make Crawl that much more of an experience. With so many sharks seen casually throughout so much of the movie, even the traditionally sinister sight of a fin above water quickly loses its power, allowing the sharks to become just as boring as the humans. Perhaps the best use of Thrash is to help cure those with galeophobia, proving that they’re really not that scary after all.

• Thrash is now available on Netflix