Netflix's Thrash Has The Most Howl-Worthy Fake-Baby Moments Since American Sniper And Twilight

Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched the entirety of the new shark-infested thriller Thrash streaming via Netflix subscription, so be warned!

When it comes to newborn babies being depicted onscreen, Hollywood has an up-and-down track record. There are certainly more wins than failures, but the failures are spectacular enough to tip the scales, and it almost always involves non-human iterations. I’m talking of course about American Sniper’s infamously awful fake baby, and Twilight: Breaking Dawn’s terrifying Renesmee animatronic that was too freaky to use in the actual movie. Thrash is certainly on that level, though not quite the same.

In Thrash, Phoebe Dynevor’s character Lisa is seemingly on her twelfth trimester when the hurricane hits the town of Annieville, where evacuation announcements apparently only go out after it’s too late. She goes from being trapped in a car in rising water to being bed-bound with contractions to having a full-on delivery by herself in the middle of floodwaters. But it isn’t the look of Lisa’s baby that’s the issue in this particular instance. It’s the wildly unrealistic way this child is handled during its first minutes outside of the womb.

Lisa wanted a water birth, and you better believe that she got one, even if it was the most chaotic version possible. She just kinda screamed a bit and plopped that little sucker out, and then pulled her new kiddo out of the water without much effort. You'd think the newborn would have had some serious breathing issues, given it was in the water for seemingly longer than babies usually are for water births. But that's not even my first issue.

Rather, it's after Lisa removes the baby from the water and holds it up to her shoulder...which is sometimes still going under the splashing water. Meaning that baby's face is also dipping along with it, and is getting splashed way more than any newborn's face should be. I get that it's wildly difficult to stay afloat while holding a baby, and that Lisa should be in absolute physical misery, but her first instinct still should have been to hold that child up in front of her, Simba-style, to avoid getting even more filthy water in its teensy lungs.

To be clear, both as a parent and someone who appreciates sound design, I could not be happier that all we hear from this baby is sporadic crying wails, and that there isn't a super-realistic depiction of a choking newborn. But still...

Lisa Puts Her Unrestrained Newborn On Floating Debris

Every one of Lisa's instincts during this this moment is just objectively wrong. First, newborns have next to zero tensile strength to hold their heads up or to balance themselves or anything that comes naturally with time. So it's wild that Lisa, upon realizing she's being targeted by a shark, pretty much swings the baby up and not-quite-slams it onto the bottom side of a desk drawer that she was hanging onto as a floating device.

She then uses a thick piece of wood to somehow cut the umbilical cord, and then shoves the drawer away from her (with enough force that the baby probably would have rolled right off of it and back into the water). But not before getting a trailer-ready one liner.

It's obviously nutty that LIsa perfectly impales the oncoming shark to death, but even widler that the baby didn't move an inch, and was still perfectly fine when Lisa went back for it.

Everyone Literally Gets Flipped Upside Down In The Water, With Zero Issues

As Whitney Peak's Dakota attempted to help Lisa climb up into her boat, a mischievously vindictive shark swam up and knocked the hell out of the bottom of it, flipping the boat over completely. Dakota, who was holding onto the baby at the time, essentially front-flipped into the water and took an awkward dip below the water. Surely the next shot features all three of them struggling to breathe as they rise back up to the surface, since the boat capsizing would have happened too quickly for them to take deep breaths ahead of time, right? (Not that the baby can do that anyway.)

Well, no. In the very next shot, Dakota, the baby and Lisa are all back up with their heads above the water. Nobody's choking. Nobody's coughing. Nobody's hair is plastered to their heads and faces the way it would be in such a situation. If it wasn't for the upside-down boat next to them, I could have been convinced it was just a hallucination.

Again, I wasn't necessarily looking to hear a miserable baby's screams here. But a certain level of danger and realism has to be presented with authenticity. Otherwise, what's the point in Lisa even having a baby within this story if the risks facing the child aren't treated with the proper amount of scrutiny and care? It might as well be the doll from American Sniper.

All in all, Tommy Wirkola's Thrash wasn't as enjoyable in my eyes as his horror comedy's Dead Snow and its even better sequel Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead. But it was still a wild watch, and here's hoping it's popular enough to convince someone to fund Dead Snow 3.