Director: Sean Byrne
Writer: Nick Lepard
Stars: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Ella Newton, Josh Heuston
Synopsis: When Zephyr, a rebellious 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.
If it were up to me, I’d tell you to go into Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals (almost) completely blind. I’d confirm two things ahead of your viewing experience: One, that sharks are absolutely involved, and two, that Jai Courtney is the personification of delirious entertainment in the film. Like, silly fun, perhaps the greatest form of the sensation. But that would be it. I’d send you off, wishing you well, and would be waiting for you on the other side, arms raised, prepared to embrace your opinion, which would unequivocally be positive, for the movie has actually been placed next to the words “blast” and “banger” in all dictionaries. Don’t check; it’s true.
Again, that’s if it were up to me. That’s how I entered the film: Not knowing a thing, fully prepared for a delightful Jaws-adjacent romp set in the outback. But my job is to tell you more, if not necessarily that much more. My job, in terms of formatting this review, is to transcribe the film’s proper synopsis. (Which, if you ask me, tells us too much straight from the jump.) If it were up to me, I’d have you scroll straight past that plot summary, right to these words, the ones telling you not to look at what this movie is about, entails, etc. It’s not worth it! We should go into movies blind more often. It’s exhilarating, the thrills we experience when we revel in the bliss of ignorance, with adventure at our fingertips. That’s why I tend not to read reviews of festival premieres – a club that Dangerous Animals is inexplicably a member of, having premiered at Cannes in May – because I don’t want to know a damn thing about a movie I’m already going to see. Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World, also starring Reinate Reinsve? My ticket was reserved before it even had a release date. Lynne Ramsay’s first film in seven years, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as two lovers of some sort? I’m seated. Bi Gan’s near-three-hour Resurrection, apparently a science fiction movie with tons of long takes? BET!!!!!!
And yet, we live in a world where reactions, reviews, and reply guys alike are inevitable forces on our feeds and in our brains, and thus we are bound to acquiesce the knowledge – for the final time, I hate to do this, and you’ve been warned – that Jai Courtney’s character in Dangerous Animals, a ship captain called Tucker, is a serial killer. He’s not some amalgamation of Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws) and Captain Ahab the way I’d imagined him, but a guy with a boat who’s obsessed with sharks and feeding his victims to them. And you know what? That makes Tucker decidedly more awesome; as a movie character, obviously, not as a person. He films these feedings with an RCA camcorder. He drinks beers on the outer deck as he fishes. He speaks in a low timbre, occasionally uttering lines that are too predictable for the script’s own good – “Some might argue that [sharks associating boats with food] is a recipe for more accidents… I’m inclined to agree with them” – but he’s a villain you would want to escape and want to watch flaunt his stuff as he threatens, mocks, and murders. In other words, he’s precisely the reason to watch a movie like Dangerous Animals: A bloodthirsty, entertaining villain, and an even better representation of the title’s deeper meaning.
Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder
Ergo, Dangerous Animals could feasibly be referring to the sharks swimming below the ocean’s surface, but is more likely nodding at power-hungry men who feed on the theoretically-weaker women they come into contact with, by circumstance or not. Prior to Byrne’s opening titles, Tucker takes two 30-something travelers eager to swim with sharks out on his boat, quickly dispatching of the male and keeping Heather (Ella Newton) alive. It’s not until later that he encounters Zephyr (Hassie Harrison, with a character name almost as killer as her own), a wayward soul whose alluring impact on those who enter her current can’t rival her desire to surf the sunny days away. She thrives “as far away from home as possible,” which only makes the sexy Aussie realtor Moses (Josh Heuston) want her more. When she suddenly disappears, seeming to have ditched her surfboard and van for stronger waves (hint: she parked by the gnarliest tides she could find, so something bad must have occurred), he takes it upon himself to find her. Big mistake… HUGE.
Running a hair under 100 minutes, there’s still a small something about Byrne’s first film in a decade that feels like it has been gestating that long, and that the many set piece ideas he and scribe Nick Lepard (whose only other screenwriting credit is the Oz Perkins’ directed Keeper, out later this year) were all jammed into the final cut. But there are worse things to be done in a film as relatively simple as this, one where the bruising Courtney sets the tone by hamming it up at an uncontrollable clip, at one point splitting the difference between the solo dance scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Risky Business, drunkenly jiving to the beat of his own delirious drum. Harrison makes for a capable, albeit somewhat stale final girl, but that feels more like a script problem than a charisma one; her line readings may be drab and the character thin, but Harrison’s physicality matches Courtney’s well as they face off down the film’s stretch.
And though much of Byrne’s thriller amounts to little more than a survival film where the most dangerous thing in most frames is not a great white but the tank-donning guy who lives on a fishing boat that looks (and probably smells) as though it’s rotting from the inside out, it’s stirring to watch the Aussie director make his own Jaws homage by honoring this aquatic subgenre’s roots without so much as attempting to reinvent its well-worn steering wheel. In the 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece caused the masses to run from the idyllic sandy beaches to the nearest multiplex in hopes of seeing what all the fuss was about, plenty have tried (and mostly failed) to effectively capture both the awe and terror that Jaws inspired regarding its Big Bad. But Byrne’s film – like Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2016 effort, The Shallows – embraces the fact that what most audiences are interested in when it comes to movies like these is watching its characters sweat. The Shallows saw Blake Lively’s surfer character get stranded on an oceanic rock as a shark circled her, waiting for its prey to give up trying to escape the jaws of defeat. In Dangerous Animals, the sharks are certainly a threat, but Byrne recognizes two things: One, that the “swim for your lives” approach has been taken before, and two, that serial killers are more predictable than sea dwellers, and still potentially more interesting to watch another human thwart. In this instance, at least, a shark film can have its chum and eat it, too.
Dangerous Animals will be available to rent on PVOD on July 22.
