Jai Courtney puts sharks to shame in the bloody blast Dangerous Animals
Killer turns by Hassie Harrison and Courtney make the gritty and violent tale a thrilling trip to sea.
Photo: Shudder
Sean Byrne is not a prolific filmmaker. It’s been a full decade since the Australian director’s last feature, the heavy-metal possession tale The Devil’s Candy. His debut The Loved Ones was six years before that. On the one hand, this is unfortunate, because Byrne’s movies are consistently stronger and better developed than many of their contemporaries. On the other, it may be those exact gaps between films that allow them to reach their potential.
Byrne’s movies are uncompromising, with a finger-in-the-wound viciousness that may also influence how long it takes to get them made. This comes through in Dangerous Animals, whose script was written by someone else—Nick Lepard, in his first produced screenplay—but which nevertheless features several of Byrne’s pet obsessions. These include diabolically creative torture scenes and a gritty obsession with serial killers. But most important is the upending of genre tropes, which both is and isn’t happening here.
Specifically, Dangerous Animals puts a spin on the shark-horror subgenre by making the sharks the least of anyone’s problems. That’s the fresh part. Where that concept goes next is more predictable: Ask yourself what the “most dangerous animal” might be, in a proverbial sense. That being said, Byrne’s interpretation of the “human as alpha predator” trope is both thoughtful and disturbingly violent—a satisfying combination of words too rarely used to describe the same film.
It helps that stars Jai Courtney and Hassie Harrison commit to their performances as physical opposites who share a Darwinian attitude towards life. Zephyr (Harrison) is a loner, a wanderer who lives out of her van and doesn’t stick around for breakfast after a one-night stand with local real-estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston) at the beginning of the movie. (Initially a way to illustrate Zephyr’s issues with intimacy, Moses eventually evolves into one of the film’s more surprising characters.) There are a few throwaway lines to explain how this Texas girl ended up surfing in Australia, but as with Sharni Vinson’s character in You’re Next, it’s how she behaves in an emergency that reveals the real Zephyr. She’s small, but she’s scrappy, and she’s extremely persistent.