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Spoilers for Amazon’s The Devil’s Mouth (2026), released July 29, 2026, directed by Jeff Wadlow.
Like many survival movies, Amazon’s The Devil’s Mouth — released July 29, 2026, and directed by Jeff Wadlow1 — brings a group of characters together and plants them in their own hell. The film traps its characters in a labyrinth of caves with a shark on the hunt and forces them to try to survive, asking its audience to root for them as they do.
The film gives its viewers a singular problem that drives the entire journey: Will the protagonists survive? However, that question only matters if its audience is emotionally invested in the characters’ fates. The Devil’s Mouth ultimately nullifies this question by leaving the audience with Max (Lana Condor) — a selfish, unlikeable character — as one half of the leading protagonists, producing a survival film with little emotional stakes and a watered-down catharsis that ultimately weakens the impact of the film’s survival narrative.
Why Empathy Matters In Survival Films
Survival films are built on placing their characters in a life-or-death situation and watching as they fight to make it out of the setting actively working against them. Because of this, the genre often relies on audience investment in an individual character or a group. The external conflict — the shark attack, the natural disaster, the hostile environment — is not always enough to drive engagement on its own. For a survival film to truly work, the audience must care about those who are facing the threat.
The Devil’s Mouth struggles with this, failing to effectively liken its audience to its characters before planting them in the danger. The film’s opening sequence begins with its characters — led primarily by best friends Sara (Kathryn Newton) and Max — acquiring a yacht and spending the day partying, and it ends with Max forgetting Sara is still swimming in the water. The boat leaves her; she is stung by multiple jellyfish, and when she is finally picked back up, the narrative lingers on Max refusing to take accountability.
Because of this, instead of utilizing its beginning to flesh out its characters in a way that invests its audience, the film uses several scene beats to showcase the toxicity of Sara and Max’s friendship. Among these, the rest of the cast fail to truly feel like a close-knit college group, falling to land in the background as shallow, underexplored characters. With the imbalanced dynamics and the controlling, narcissistic narrative surrounding Max’s character, the film alienates its audience from their empathy by focusing solely on unlikeable characteristics and dynamics.
The Difference Between Flawed And Unlikeable
One misconception in character writing is that characters with flawed personalities automatically become unlikeable. In reality, flawed characters can bring the audience even closer to the narrative because of the balance between positive and negative qualities. No one is without flaws, and often, it is these qualities that people connect to in media. Characters that are fleshed out and shown to be imperfect can make it easier for viewers to root for their success and their eventual growth.
Unlikeable characters, in contrast, isolate the audience. There is a lack of accountability, self-awareness, and desire for improvement that creates a disconnect between viewer and character. Whereas someone written to be flawed evokes empathy through their mistakes and struggles, unlikeable characters offer no reason for the audience to care about their journey. There is a fine line between flawed and unlikeable, and The Devil’s Mouth unfortunately crosses it with their portrayal of Max.
Almost immediately, Max is painted as an external force working against Sara, with the friend group instantly finding themselves in conflict following Max’s negligence. The film offers its audience plenty of reasons to root against Max and Sara’s friendship without giving them enough reasons to understand why they’re friends in the first place. Without balancing the good with the bad — in terms of both individual characters and their dynamics — there is no compelling reason for the audience to invest themselves, and the film’s conflict ultimately falls flat.
In comparison, other survival films that utilize a similar friendship dynamic to Max and Sara do so in an effective way. Films like Fall (2022; Scott Mann)2 and 47 Meters Down (2017; Johannes Roberts)3 pair two individuals with opposing traits and allow them to push each other positively. Like Max, each of these films features a character that ultimately lands them in the danger that awaits them. In Fall, it is Hunter (Virginia Gardner) who convinces Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) to climb the tower with her, leading to them getting stranded at the top; In 47 Meters Down, Kate (Claire Holt) is the one who talks Lisa (Mandy Moore) into cage diving with sharks.
The difference with these films is that they make an effort to expose the characters’ similarities as well as their differences, allowing the audience to understand the relationship enough to invest in what might happen to them. Instead of focusing so heavily on their flaws and the ways in which these traits pit them against one another, viewers are allowed to relax and have fun before the threat arrives. The flaws are not hidden, and the characters are not made out to be perfect, but their more negative qualities do not clog the narrative lens.
Where films like Fall and 47 Meters Down use their flawed characters to push one another towards positive growth, The Devil’s Mouth only uses Max in an attempt to drive tension. Instead of her flawed personality leading to a cathartic turning point for Sara, Max is constantly making their escape more difficult. She acts as another conflict in the plot instead of a supporting force. The longer she survives, the more exhausting the narrative becomes due to her unlikability, and by the time she finally succumbs to the shark, the emotional weight of the moment is cheapened by how far removed the audience is from her character.
When Unlikeable Characters Work In Survival Movies
Like any character type, unlikeable characters do have a place in survival movies. Giving someone a reason to hate a character can add to the thrill that works as a pillar in this genre. Getting to watch a horrible character get beaten by the threat targeting them can be satisfying for viewers, and it can better allow an audience to trust that the narrative will reward and punish accordingly, in a way that makes it easier to invest time in the film.
The Devil’s Mouth attempts to showcase intentionally unlikeable characters as well. Greg (Gavin Casalegno) is an example of this. As somewhat of an outsider from the group, tagging along almost as a plus-one to girlfriend Adrienne (Tommi Rose), he is shown to be childish and disrespectful, disregarding multiple rules and instructions as they move through the caves. These characteristics make him an effective first death — introducing the stakes with the arrival of the shark without disquieting its audience too soon with the death of a more likeable character.
However, because Max is even more unlikeable than Greg, from this point the deaths fail to gradually increase in stakes and tension. The majority of the cast fall to the wayside amongst Sara and Max’s conflicts, leading to them lacking any defining depth and ultimately ensuring that each death would land as quietly as Greg’s.
Max In The Devil’s Mouth — When A Film Convinces Its Audience To Root Against Its Character
Max moves beyond flawed and enters unlikability with each terrible choice she makes. She discredits Sara’s career to get her to consider following her to LA, leaves Sara stranded in the ocean, ruins a dinner by playing victim and forcing Sara to apologize, forces the group to take a more difficult cave route despite the guide’s insistence they do the beginner swim, refuses to go back when Adrienne gets injured on a rock, tries to abandon an injured Adrienne amidst the threat of the shark, and then forces Sara and James to follow her through a less logical escape route merely because she refused to give up control over the situation.
It is a lot for one character to manage in a single film — especially one that is meant to draw in the audience alongside Sara — and ultimately, it cheapens the emotional weight of the film. The way in which she constantly works against the group displaces the audience and makes it easier to root for the shark.
If she were placed in the film in a methodical way, acting as an antagonistic force that drove the characters closer or forced them to fight harder for survival, it might have worked, but the film does not appear to use her that way. Her flaws are never truly challenged, and despite the film using her constantly as an opposing force, it still asks its audience to care about her.
Because of this, despite Sara being the main protagonist, it is Max who influences a majority of the film’s emotional stakes. An example of this is the death of James (Nico Hiraga). As Max’s boyfriend, the moment James gets trapped beneath a rock to drown is constructed to be a heavy scene — Max and Sara are forced to leave him underwater, their goodbye a juxtaposition to the quick and bloody deaths prior — and yet, due to the film’s negligence toward Max’s character and subsequently her relationships, it does not truly land. The scene hinges on the audience’s connection to Max and her grief, forgetting that it failed to establish a reason to empathize with her to begin with.
Similarly, when it is Max’s time to die, the emotional toll depends on Sara and her friendship with Max. However, due to the film repeatedly showing its audience the ways in which Max negatively impacts Sara’s life instead of the ways they connect as friends, the grief needed to make the moment impactful is somewhat absent. Because of her importance in the narrative, Max’s characterization shoulders a lot of the film’s weight, and by making her too unlikeable, much of it crumbles around her.
Characterization As A Pillar In Survival Films
A successful survival film does not rely solely on its danger and suspense to make it a memorable watch, but also on the people who must face the threat and fight to come out on the other side. Compelling protagonists, flawed or otherwise, create the emotional stakes that are necessary to capture an audience. Without making the effort to liken the audience to these characters, the central tension at work in a survival film is weakened, and the film is at risk of losing its audience too soon.
The Devil’s Mouth highlights this risk by emphasizing a character’s negative qualities without providing sufficient emotional balance. The unlikeable portrayal of Max, the focus on Sara’s toxic friendship with her, and the lack of development for the side characters create a leading cast of characters that lack relatable vulnerabilities or any true capacity for growth and, ultimately, disregard one of the survival film genre’s core ingredients: convincing its audience to care whether its characters make it out alive.