A Shark Film With a Different Kind of Bite
The Devil’s Mouth is not trying to reinvent the ocean. Director Jeff Wadlow’s new film leans into what the shark genre does well – escalating dread, physical stakes, characters stripped down to instinct – while centering a story about five female friends navigating survival and each other. It is an Amazon-MGM production, and it stars Lana Condor and Kathryn Newton as Max and Sara, the emotional core of the film.
Condor’s Max is a confident, polarizing sweet-talker. Newton’s Sara is the counterweight. Together, their dynamic gives the film something beyond creature-feature mechanics: an actual friendship with weight behind it. Horror and thriller genres have historically been among the few spaces where women could lead without industry pushback, something Sarah Michelle Gellar has pointed out publicly about her own early career, and The Devil’s Mouth is banking on that tradition holding.
Representation That Doesn’t “Make a Blip”
Condor has been here before with Amazon-MGM. Her action-ballerina film Pretty Lethal came out earlier this year, also with her in the lead. That’s two consecutive lead roles at the same studio in the same year – which sounds like momentum until she contextualizes it.
“Within the past six years, we’ve seen more Asian representation, more leading roles, than we’ve ever seen before, but still, in comparison, it doesn’t even make a blip,” Condor said. The qualifier is important. Progress exists, but progress measured against a very low baseline does not tell a complete story. She is not dismissing what has changed. She is refusing to let the change become the ceiling.
“I definitely think more leading roles need to be written for us, because it’s really super easy to put us not in a lead,” she said. The passive construction she uses – being placed or not placed, written in or written out – reflects how little control actors have over the architecture of opportunity. Scripts get written before casting happens. If the character is unnamed or peripheral before anyone reads for it, that’s not a casting problem.
Condor called it a “testament” to both The Devil’s Mouth and Amazon that the film champions non-white leads. She is not framing the studio as heroic for doing something obvious, but she is acknowledging that obvious things don’t happen automatically. “There’s work to be done, but there’s also a lot of us that are super stoked to do the work. So it’s really like, let’s get going,” she said. The urgency is real. The frustration underneath the enthusiasm is also real.
What To All the Boys Built – and Still Carries
In 2018, Condor starred in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, a romantic comedy that quietly became a cultural reference point for East Asian women watching mainstream film. She was the lead. The love interest. The protagonist whose interiority the story lived inside. For a demographic routinely cast as the smart friend or the expository side character, it registered. “My honest-to-God reason that pushes me to keep making films is I really want people to feel seen,” Condor said. “That’s what drives my basically, my entire want.”
That is not a talking point. Seven years after To All the Boys, she is still anchoring the same conviction to new projects, which suggests it was never marketing language to begin with. “I feel so grateful that I get to storytell just in general,” she added. The Devil’s Mouth becomes, in that context, something more than a shark movie on her résumé – it is another attempt to keep that visibility from being a one-time event.
Why the Genre Keeps Working For Women
There is a logic to why horror and thriller films have historically functioned as entry points for women who wanted to lead. The genre does not require a studio to believe a woman is universally beloved or commercially safe in the way a prestige drama or a big-budget action franchise might demand. Survival narratives flatten the question. Audiences accept a woman outrunning something terrifying. They have always accepted that.
What Wadlow is attempting with The Devil’s Mouth is to use that acceptance as a foundation rather than a ceiling. Female friendship – the way it holds under pressure, the way it fractures, the way it reconstitutes – is the actual subject of the film. The sharks are the context. Condor and Newton are the argument.
Newton’s Sara and Condor’s Max being described as “the beating heart of the film” is a phrase that gets used loosely in press cycles, but here it has structural meaning. These are not supporting characters given a moment of agency. The film is built around their relationship. That is still not the industry default, which is exactly the point Condor keeps returning to – not with bitterness, but with the kind of focused irritation that gets things done. She said it plainly: “Let’s get going.” The question is whether the scripts already in development are listening.
