A nerve-shredding single-location survival story bares its razor sharp teeth and tries to survive on streaming

Single-location thrillers are always worth checking out if the concept is pulled off in the right way, but there’s no doubt a lot of fans of the subgenre out there who won’t even be aware of 2018’s dramatically underseen and overlooked The Pool.

Writer and director Ping Lumpraploeng does an awful lot with very little in the nerve-shredding and anxiety-inducing tale, one that blew critics away to the tune of a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. Imagine the instant cult classic Crawl but on a much smaller, more intimate, and dangerous scale, and you’re halfway to figuring out what The Pool is all about.

Theeradej Wongpuapan stars as Day, who gets left alone to clear up a swimming pool after a hard day’s work. Letting tiredness get the better of him, he ends up falling asleep on an inflatable raft, only to wake up and discover that the water has started draining out, and he’s ended up so deep that there’s no way out.

While that doesn’t sound particularly exciting on its own, let’s not overlook the big-ass crocodile farm that just so happens to be next door, and also has a reptilian escapee on the loose that coincidentally manages to make its way right inside Day’s makeshift prison.

Short on budget but high on ambition, The Pool makes the most of its limited resources to deliver a knockout adventure on a minimal budget, one that’s caught attention on streaming over the weekend after FlixPatrol revealed it to be one of the top-viewed titles on Prime Video.