Australian filmmaker Sean Byrne is obsessed with obsession.
From the power drill wielding Lola in his masterful feature debut The Loved Ones to Tucker, who has an unhealthy appreciation for sharks in Dangerous Animals, Byrne loves to delve into the psyche of people who are consumed and love to see their victims squirm. While The Loved Ones looked at how an unhinged prom queen wannabe responds to rejection, Dangerous Animals wonders who is the more terrifying creature – shark or man? Free-spirit loner and keen surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is loving van life as she explores the Australian coast, spending more time in the ocean catching waves than on land. While in Surfers Paradise, she meets local real estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston) and the two spend a steamy evening together before she ditches him for another wave.Their new potential romance is abruptly interrupted when Zephyr is kidnapped by shark-obsessed serial killer Bruce Tucker (Jai Courtney), who takes sick pleasure in feeding his victims alive to sharks and recording the twisted activity on videotape (how nostalgic).
Tucker is the captain of his own boat that allows thrill seekers to “swim with the sharks” – which gives him quick and easy access to tourists who will not be missed and his favourite animals: sharks. But Zephyr has a shady past and an instinct for survival – and she will not be fed to the local wildlife without a fierce fight. With distinct echoes of Wolf Creek, Jaws and The Silence of the Lambs (and even a little bit of Rogue thrown in for good measure), it may sound like Dangerous Animals is a Frankenstein of ideas and elements from other films.
However, scriptwriter Nick Lepard and director Sean Byrne have whipped up their own version of thrills. Though they are not the first to tap into our primal fears of what lurks under the water, they do demonstrate quite vividly that what lurks on land is just as terrifying, creating a claustrophobic and hopeless scenario. Nowhere feels safe. It is clear the two understand that not much of this will truly rattle an audience unless we have characters we want to see survive.
They commit to spending time building Zephyr and Moses, giving them a meet-cute, exposing their traits and teasing a romance, so that when they are eventually in peril, we are genuinely distraught. It makes the near escapes even more nail-biting – and there are a few of them. Byrne also leans heavily on sound effects and score to unease his audience – you can almost imagine his glee at cranking up their volumes during the mixing phase.
Relative newcomers Harrison and Heuston are a great pair of leads, both charming and resourceful, but Courtney is the real surprise here, delivering a performance we have not yet seen from him. Will he go down in history as a horror genre killer that people will refer to for decades, like Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor or The Silence of the Lambs’ Jame Gumb? Likely not, but his awe and fascination for sharks mixed with a chilling lack of remorse or conscience could be cause for a sleepless night or two. Despite one laughable pause during a tense sequence where Zephyr shares a “moment” with a shark, Byrne’s film is otherwise tonally sound – a solid addition to the killer shark sub-genre and horror genre in general.
7 out of 10
