Beware of 'Dangerous Animals'
Sean Byrne's shark thriller is mostly chum, truth be told. Jai Courtney's performance, however, gives it a distinct flavor of mind-numbing, maniacal fun.
YOU’D BE FORGIVEN for thinking that killer shark films have long peaked (and plateaued). We’ve seen all sorts of sharks in the movies: smart and dumb sharks, big-ass sharks and normal-sized sharks, sharks swept away by monsoons, tsunamis, and literal tornadoes. And of course, there’s Jaws, the grand-daddy of trijcentennicuspid predators, a creature whose wide smile is plastered across millions-of-dollars’ worth of merchandise. Nickname Bruce, grand-daddy shark is meant to represent a menacing source of abject fear necessary to spring society into collective action.
The sharks in Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals don’t necessarily slot in that peg. Here, they’re just…well, sharks, all but wholly misunderstood creatures. But that’s not why Tuck, a smarmy shark cage guide in Queensland, identifies so much with killer sharks. Well, honestly, the movie also doesn’t bother with it that much either, apart from an incident that left him maimed on his full right side. Oh, right. He’s also a serial killer.
It’s a funny concept, serial killing with sharks. Tuck is a bit of a clown, too; a Mick Taylor incarnate if he decided to ditch Wolf Creek for the open sea. It shouldn’t work, but in Jai Courtney’s hands, it just clicks. He can flick the switch between magnetic and maniacal with unnerving ease, kind of like a brasher Dexter Morgan, had he not been introduced to Harry’s Code (remember that Dexter has, at one point, fed his victims to Floridan gators, so there’s that).
Charismatic as hell, Tuck doesn’t have too much trouble luring unknowing tourists on the deep end where he’d set up an elaborate contraption — a buoyant Saw torture trap — that lets him sadistically feed them to the sharks. He also has designs, it seems, as a D.O.P., taking great care in filming snuffs with a VCR camera on board. He seems much too pleased whenever his killing would yield a “good show,” and unlike the sickos in Shark Night 3D, Tuck isn’t considering a mass audience (or a massive check) for his work.
The rest of the movie is pretty standard B-to-C-shlock, which is to say it’s fine but it’s sometimes ingratiating to watch. The protagonist — an American drifter named Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) who’s visiting the Gold Coast for the surfer-friendly waves — seems plopped onto the mix as a counteragent to Tuck’s ruthless clownery. But she’s also given a love interest, a trust fund baby named Moses (John Heuston) who’s unbelievably smitten after a casual hookup. And it kinda undermines her character’s function so much that when we reach the movie’s denouement (there’s a nice visual flourish that calls back to the bit about scarlet king snakes being poser coral snakes), it feels anything but earned.And somehow, Zephyr and Moses’ arc feels more fantastical than a serial killer with a shark modus operandi, and it’s just…well, mind-numbingly bad to watch.
Besides that, the movie is just fine. It fills a hole for viewers who are starved of mindless horrors, especially now that arty existential horror seems to be the norm. Like many killer shark films, Dangerous Animals isn’t without its issues, but as Tuck puts it, this time “it’s not the sharks’ fault.”
ABOUT THE FILM
🦈 Dangerous Animals (2025)
dir. Sean Byrne | Horror, Thriller, Comedy | 🇦🇺🇺🇸When Zephyr, a savvy and free-spirited surfer, is abducted by a shark-obsessed serial killer and held captive on his boat, she must figure out how to escape before he carries out a ritualistic feeding to the sharks below.