DANGEROUS ANIMALS
2025
Directed by Sean Byrne
Written by Nick Lepard
The very existence of Dangerous Animals is heartwarming to me*, because it means that even all the way out here in the decaying future of cinema in 2025, there can still be, on occasion, a new combination of elements that gives you something you've never seen before—or at least I, myself, can't name a movie with an exactly identical premise, or even one that's especially similar—which is honestly a surprise in its own right, because you'd think it shouldn't have taken an entire film industry (an entire interlocking community of industries, even, for Dangerous Animals is predominantly Australian) a whole fifty years of looking at Jaws, and looking at Psycho, without having a light bulb go off above somebody's head. You'd think it would at least have happened after Thunderball; at the latest, with every last component of the idea having been demonstrated somewhere else, it should've happened soon after The Spy Who Loved Me. Now, I can sense you out there, straw reader, and you're wondering if something so blatantly derivative could possibly be described as "new," which makes me want to throw something at your straw head. No, this is the kind of crazed exploitation mash-up that surges with junk creativity, and, almost as importantly, the potential for creativity; of course, then they named their movie "Dangerous Animals" anyway so maybe we should be prepared for it to a hit a ceiling pretty quickly.
I've somewhat summarized the movie already, and I would assume you already have a fairly firm idea whether you'd want to see it from the premise described by the phrase Jaws Meets Psycho: in Queensland's Gold Goast, there is a man, Tucker (Jai Courtney), who makes his living selling tourist adventures, specifically shark cage dives where his customers come face-to-face with the Indian Ocean's most fearsome killers, which sometimes includes him, for when he sees the opportunity, he feeds women to sharks. Sometimes that opportunity comes to him, as is the case with Heather (Ella Newton) and Greg (Liam Greinke), who arrive seeking the Tucker Experience, which they certainly get, Greg knifed and unceremoniously thrown overboard and Heather kept around for a more macabre fate; sometimes, however, he has to make the opportunity happen. Enter Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an itinerant surfer and van-life loner, whom we meet reluctantly rendering roadside assistance to a nerdy/built local and fellow surfer, Moses (Josh Heuston), and less reluctantly allowing herself to get roped into a one-night stand with him, though like the proverbial bat out of hell she's gone before the morning comes. Still, they did exchange numbers, and she might see him again, at least if she somehow manages to extricate herself from her grave new circumstances, namely being kidnapped out of the oceanside car park and locked down in the belly of the boat with Heather, while Tucker cheerfully informs that they're his new chums.
A movie like this is only as good as its craft, and I'm not sure that either its director (horror filmmaker Sean Byrne, for whom I expect this must be his highest-profile project by far, and whose small but chronologically-intermittent filmography of three features makes him out to be something of a kidnap thriller specialist) or its writer Nick Lepard (a pretty annoying name for a guy who wrote a movie called Dangerous Animals) have truly internalized it. Which is not to impugn its craft, which is largely acceptable and in some regards even quite good—though the highest exemplar of craft here is coming from maybe the single most unexpected place, and not from its director or crew—so we can circle back to that later. Lepard's screenplay, on the other hand, is I suppose crafted, but in the more pejorative sense; basically, what we have here is a movie that not only would you think would've already been made in the 1980s, but probably should've been, when exploitation movies were happier to be exploitation movies taking their premises for all they (and their budgets) could, rather than attempts at character drama. This would've already been operating against a headwind: Harrison is absolutely better when she's a function of a thriller screenplay rather than the character this study would strongly prefer her to be, so she nails the "exhausted victim still determined to turn the tables on her captor" in the stretches of thriller procedure that are, thankfully, still Dangerous Animals' real bread and butter, and struggles with practically every line of dialogue that is not directed to the immediate task of her survival, even including the (relievingly, not too common) action heroine quips, and isn't really up to the challenge of striking a persuasive attitude of defiance whenever this has to be projected towards a scene partner rather than only the camera, which is unfortunate because that attitude of defiance is the subject of perhaps most of Zephyr's exchanges with Tucker. (I will not say she doesn't "pull it off," but it may work on you subliminally: one strongly presumes Harrison must be playing considerably younger than she is, given that the textures of a sullen grown-up unwanted foster child don't quite feel the same if Zephyr is meant to be thirty-four.) Heuston is arguably better on his side, though I'm reasonably sure it's the result of him having less screentime. Newton is plain bad, stammering through a character who's already actively irritating in that her only function, besides body count (this gonzo-sounding horror film could probably use more characters with that function, actually), is to prompt backstory conversations. That means she has backstory, and I spent the entire scene where it gets puked up into the movie really hoping that Zephyr would expressly tell her to shut up because her tertiary character's relationship with her mother is not usefully related to the crisis at hand.
I don't know, it's a cliche these days to blame it on "elevated horror" but I don't know what else to blame it on, except whatever was going on in Lepard's life when he wrote it, but if we leave aside the less charitable takes, it's a movie about how Zephyr learns that going it alone is an insufficient way to approach life, with a very salient amount of care put into how Zephyr relates to people (particularly men) one way and changing to relate to them another way, and much, much less care put into making this invisible—and I think I should remind you that the movie is about people getting fed to fucking sharks, and the problems associated with being one of those people. It's a bummer, because Dangerous Animals actually does start off with the kind of dialogue you can't get too mad at, because it had the kind of old-fashioned quaintness and random messiness that you should affirmatively want out of a movie that needs to sketch characters and establish relationships but the writer only slightly cares because that's not the screenplay's actual purpose, which tends to beget more personality than something more controlled since horror is supposed to be the messy collision of the horrific with the normal everyday. Pretty soon, however, that dialogue begins to acquire a very unappealing rigidity, where every single thing out of Zephyr's or Moses's or even Heather's mouth (while that's still possible), plays into the themes and the central character arc, and I just don't know when "good screenwriting" and "mechanical screenwriting" became synonyms, for instance this film's perceived need to satisfy the perceived "rule" that when a character discusses the meaning of a song in the first act it means they have to quote the song as a "badass" zinger in the third.
Well, at least it's human running the machine: those uncharitable takes would involve speculation that Lepard was inspired by a one-night stand who ghosted him, and while he certainly doesn't want her to die, he would still like her to suffer a bit. It doesn't help that on some level the movie's aware of what it's doing, and it responds with a bit of paralysis, completely unsure how sleazy it wants to be when it's trying to be do character and themes inside a movie about a guy who feeds women to sharks (and videotapes it!), that for some nutty reason also doubles as a veiled, masculine-side gender war treatise. It's almost impressive how far out of its way a scene with Harrison or her body double (I'm pretty sure the latter, and I'm almost dead certain Harrison's face is digitally slapped onto her surfer double's) that doesn't have nudity goes to get there, and hide the R-rating-triggering portions of her body, in a movie that is, mind you, obviously R-rated: it appears someone had to do actual math—potentially, math based on pre-shooting measurements of the actress's cowgirl breast droop—to just barely keep her nipples out of the frame, and honestly, I think that's at least weirder, if not strictly-speaking "sleazier," than areolas that were simply there with nobody making a big deal out of them. (They might've just manipulated the frame in post, I realize, but it's definitely the one or the other.) You may also have noticed that I have not spoken of how this movie realizes its selling point of shark attacks. Interesting that I haven't. Anyway, it will occur to you pretty quickly, I think, that if it didn't want to deal with the brass tacks of the guy who feeds women to sharks, then the guy who doesn't feed only women to sharks was a possibility, and I guess it occurred to Lepard and/or Byrne eventually, too, though in point of fact only a very few people get fed to sharks in this movie at all, and it's done demurely when they are. (Byrne's happy to put a camera under the water in a tank—sometimes I'm not sure it's "a tank"—that's being digitally extended into "an ocean," but when the spectacle comes, we are by and large asked to imagine what bestial violence is being wrought beneath the froth, though the aftermath of one kill is superbly gross and, better yet, mournful.) If absolutely nothing else, I think Greg should've been fed to a shark to climax the prologue; I mean, that's a missed opportunity to establish your movie's real thesis at the outset, right?
If I've been implying it, I should be explicit: frankly, this is almost unambiguously as much of a budget thing as a tastefulness thing; Jaws is going to be more expensive than Psycho, that's just a fact, and not much in Dangerous Animals proves that the decision to leave its horror mostly on the other side of the water's surface comes out of some deep intentionality. One of the neater tricks Byrne ever pulls, in fact, is accumulating some awfully well-chosen stock footage for the prologue, so well-chosen that while I was pretty sure it must be stock footage even when it was being integrated (digital compositing, or maybe even a rear projection) alongside the actors, the sheer evilness of its featured shark extras was such that I wondered, even hoped, that CGI had just gotten that good and inexpensive; we will later learn that nope, it really hasn't. Though to give Byrne a little more credit, he obviously made sure that one of the last effects shots, which is by some margin the most important effects shot, was labored over in a way many of the prior shots of shark fins slicing through the water, rendered by way of one of the earlier PlayStations, probably weren't; even if that close-to-last shot isn't, you know, convincing, at least it's pretty ambitious.
Budget might even explain why an overreliance on story and acting comprises a surprising amount of a movie that, one might argue, doesn't have an affirmative need to run 99 minutes, "short" by modern standards but, I'd think needless to say, a hazardous amount of space to give over to your shark-based serial killer movie in any era. (Dangerous Animals runs, at a minimum, three minutes too long, at least in its present configuration: there is the most wrongheaded "oh no!" attempt at a post-climax reversal I think I've ever seen, so brief and incompetent and pointless that it feels more like a pratfall than a final kick of horror, and which brings us to the exact same last images we'd have had without it. On the other hand, that prologue with Heather and Greg is the movie at somewhere close to its best self—it may, in fact, be better at suspense than it is at thrills, even if it's necessarily going to wind up going a lot heavier on the latter—and, not that I want to just starting giving notes here, maybe the prologue could've been a lot longer, because while it is obviously wasn't ever going to actually have Psycho's suckerpunch of a structure, it's no crime for a movie to pretend it could.)
But that is just some constant and almost unalloyed bitching for a movie I'm gonna say I enjoyed, isn't it? Such is my unlikeable way, and for all the weaknesses that are keeping Dangerous Animals from really excelling with its objectively-excellent premise, there are fewer but much more important countervailing strengths. Firstly, the screenplay, when it isn't insisting on being some kind of indie romantic drama from the mid-00s, manages a surprisingly solid job keeping things interesting and dynamic even though it's become a captivity movie (Room! with a shark?) rather than the unusual slasher it was sort of sold as**, tactical and gnarly in turn; the competitors for its best scene, besides the opening, don't really have anything directly to do with sharks or the water (they're at least on the boat), but I wouldn't dream of spoiling the one that made me genuinely upset (good God, lady, use a tourniquet), it's so very going-for-it, while the other one is just a very delightful piece of thriller cross-cutting (and thriller elision!) that gets Moses back into the action, for all the good it ultimately does anybody. I'd also say the idea of Zephyr preparing to joust a shark is cool, though like much else shark-related here don't get your hopes up, and if you like ladies battling sharks I might refer you to The Shallows or 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, both of which manage something slightly closer to Jaws-like tangibility to their waterborne action. Still, Byrne and cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe are acquitting themselves pretty well topside: beaches and oceans and boats, for whatever reason, tend to be the best use case for this kind of poppy videography, and notwithstanding its cost-conscious constraints, I like the way this movie looks and the GC locations and the boat that production designer Pete Baxter has given it. As for how it sounds, for whatever reason what must've been a not-inconsiderable portion of the small budget I keep mentioning went to a song list comparable to a 90s movie intent on selling a soundtrack album, and Byrne and editor Kasra Rassoulzadegan are, I suppose, making the most of that, although it's a weird thing, and sometimes a jarring thing, considering how incongruously the prologue smashes into an open credits girlrock cover of "Dancing With Myself."*** (Michael Yezerski's score, meanwhile, is a workable collection of Inception and Prometheus trailer cliches.)
What I haven't mentioned yet, though, is the very obvious best thing that Dangerous Animals has going for it, its dangerous animal himself, what I'm pretty confident is a career-best performance for Jai Courtney, an actor I've actively disliked for most of his career. Well, now he's great. It's exactly the performance the "guy who feeds people to sharks" needs, and the one that's best-supported by this script—I suppose it's unclear if Tucker's sheer Australianness was all in the script, or if Courtney simply brought that on his own, though the constant recourse to enthusiastically infodumping marine biology facts into conversation with a literal captive audience certainly is, as is his comic book supervillain origin story and the (not even too-stressed, which goes to my point about how it's better when these things are allowed to seem organic and half-accidental) meta current in Tucker's antagonism, of how the sharkman killer who stages spectacle is naturally akin to a director of horror cinema. Courtney chews way more scenery than any of his sharks, anyway, absurdly colorful and affably vivacious as a madman with a unique method, and using his physicality to immense effect, bringing Island Life to this cartoonish sex murderer (it's a bummer no Jimmy Buffett makes it onto that soundtrack album) and fearlessly slobbing and slurring his way through a plot that also requires him to be Michael Myers, a layer of beer-guzzling fat and a constantly-unbuttoned boat shirt not remotely obscuring how much muscle is underneath, just like his glinty smile isn't obscuring the blazing rage and perverse spirituality that powers his insanity. Whatever else the movie might be trying to accomplish, Courtney is always there, pulling it bodily back towards a legitimate midnight movie good time.
Score: 7/10
*I did mean to see it in theaters. I don't know exactly how it did, though I'm fairly sure that its $6.8 million gross—there's no published budget, only the nebulous assertion that it brought $10.7 million into the economy of Queensland, however the hell that's calculated—could not possibly have turned a profit. This is obviously less heartwarming.
**It goes as hard as any movie made in the last twenty years with that most-disagreeable, "have you ever noticed that in newspaper stories, when people are stabbed, they're often stabbed dozens of times? why do you think that might be?" slasher trope, however.
***Theeeemes.
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