Five Netflix docs to watch if you loved ‘Shipwrecked’
It’s January 13th, 2012, and the Costa Concordia is floating about near the Italian island of Giglio with more than 4,200 people on board, all expecting a nice little cruise. Next thing you know, bang! It smacks straight into some rocks and rips a massive hole in the side. Soon enough, it kills the power and starts tipping over. What was meant to be a normal night at sea turns into pure bedlam, with hundreds of people legging it through pitch-black corridors trying to find a way out. Thirty-two people never made it home. That’s Netflix’s Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea for you.
Netflix’s Shipwrecked takes you right back into the middle of it using survivor stories along with phone videos and recordings from inside the ship. You have got people asking what’s going on and announcements telling them not to worry. Nobody knows whether it’s serious or whether they should just stay put. Panic everywhere.
And that’s why everyone is so curious about it, because the whole thing sounds completely made up. Captain Francesco Schettino leaves the ship while numerous passengers are still stuck on board. Good thing that he was later sentenced to 16 years in prison. The scandal around him ends up nearly overshadowing the massive salvage operation, which was one of the most expensive ever attempted.
That mix of people making shocking decisions and ordinary passengers just trying to stay alive is what makes Shipwrecked so hard to look away from. The five documentaries below go into the same sort of nightmare situations. You’d be fuming and terrified, but trust us, these are worth a watch.
Five Netflix docs to watch if you loved Shipwrecked
Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster (Mark Monroe, 2025)
Everyone already knows how the Titan story ended, but this documentary still makes the whole journey feel even more disturbing. In June 2023, OceanGate’s experimental submersible headed down towards the wreck of the Titanic with five people on board, including company founder Stockton Rush. It never came back. The documentary goes right back through the years before the implosion, when engineers and former workers kept raising concerns about the carbon-fibre hull and failed tests. Warning after warning, and the whole thing still went ahead.
Director Mark Monroe treats the disaster as a warning that kept getting ignored. Internal footage and interviews show how serious the concerns were long before everything went west. That is what connects it to Shipwrecked: the sea may have been where the disaster happened, but poor decisions had already done the damage. By the end, OceanGate’s big talk about innovation looks more reckless.
The Trapped 13: How We Survived the Thai Cave (Pailin Wedel, 2022)
From the ocean floor, this one goes underground. In 2018, twelve boys from Thailand’s Wild Boars football team entered Tham Luang Cave with their coach. Before they realised, heavy rain flooded the tunnels behind them. Next thing, they were trapped miles inside with no clear way out. Absolute nightmare! The whole world followed the rescue, but The Trapped 13 finally lets the boys tell the story themselves.
They describe the darkness, hunger and fear, along with how they kept one another calm while rescuers searched through flooded tunnels. The best part of this documentary is that it treats them like equals and does not shove them into the background while the adults take over. Their memories carry the whole thing. When the team is finally found alive, the relief hits.
The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari (Rory Kennedy, 2022)
On December 9, 2019, tourists were exploring New Zealand’s Whakaari, also known as White Island, when the volcano erupted with barely any warning. Twenty-two people died, and survivors suffered devastating burns. The mere imagination of this can send chills down your spine. Poor rescuers still had to head towards an island throwing out toxic ash. Director Rory Kennedy rebuilds the disaster minute by minute through phone footage and survivor testimony.
The strongest moments are not only the eruption itself. They come from watching strangers make choices with almost no time to think. Like Shipwrecked, it begins as a normal tourist trip and turns into a death trap in seconds. The difference is that there is no captain to blame and nowhere safe to leg it. The whole landscape turns hostile. Kudos to the rescuers, because that took some nerve.
The Twister: Caught in the Storm (Alexandra Lacey, 2025)
It starts as a normal Sunday in Joplin, Missouri, and then the sky turns dead moody. On May 22nd, 2011, an EF5 tornado tore through the city, killing 158 people and injuring more than a thousand. The Twister: Caught in the Storm uses footage recorded by locals who had no idea they were documenting one of the deadliest tornadoes in US history. Windows burst, cameras shake and so on. You’ll witness whole streets vanish within minutes through this footage. The speed of it is brutal.
The film stays with families and first responders while they try to work out what is even left around them. That confusion gives it the same pull as Shipwrecked. The main difference is how quickly everything goes west. The Costa Concordia disaster happened over hours, while Joplin was ripped apart before people could properly process the warning.
The Lost Children (Lali Houghton and Orlando von Einsiedel, 2024)
By the time rescuers found the four Indigenous siblings at the centre of The Lost Children, they had survived forty days alone in the Colombian Amazon. Their small plane crashed in May 2023, killing the adults on board and leaving children aged between one and thirteen surrounded by dense jungle. Forty days, you know. Most grown adults would be done in after a weekend. The search was led by Colombian soldiers and Indigenous volunteers whose knowledge of the forest became crucial.
The hero of the story is Lesly, the eldest child, using skills passed down through her family to protect the younger ones, find food, and avoid predators, all while leaving clues. Thirteen years old and keeping the whole lot alive. That is some effort. After the mechanical failures and human chaos of Shipwrecked, this offers something different: survival built on memory and knowledge handed down through generations. The rescuers and relatives refused to believe the children were gone.