Dangerous Animals (2025) review

Dir. Sean Byrne

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

If it were up to me, we’d see one shark movie a summer, and I’m not talking The Meg. I’m talking a classically minded creature feature with no frills, carnage, and those summer vibes that give you an extra pause before thinking about hitting the water as the weather warms.

Think about it: these films seldom disappoint. The Shallows was a strong showcase of Blake Lively’s talents, and 47 Meters Down was a mixed bag, but delivered on the promise of its claustrophobic setting. However, the less said about Shark Night 3D, the better. Besting all of them for the best contemporary killer shark movie in modern times is Dangerous Animals, a slick, artfully shot chiller anchored in large part by a disturbing turn from Jai Courtney.

Directed by Sean Byrne — a reliable name in Australian horror, known for his lean premises and love of bloodshed — his latest could be studied by aspiring horror directors in the realm of economical plotting. Byrne wastes no time introducing us to a pair of tourists who stumble upon Tucker (Courtney), a proprietor of a shark cage tourist business off the Australian coast. Tucker is the kind of guy who is charismatically off-putting, if that makes sense. His monologues have a lyrical delivery to them. After he pulls the caged couple up from the water, he stabs the male to death before he has a chance to dry off. He takes his female partner (Ella Newton) captive, with a plan in mind, of course.

Tucker is a career serial killer whose weapon of choice is the sharks he lures to his boat with copious amounts of blood and chum. He treats sharks like Gods who need sacrificial lambs on a regular basis. He drugs women, cuffs them in the brig of his large boat, and slowly drops them into chum-laden waters via a harness all while videotaping the action on his VHS camcorder. At night, when he’s done fishing, he chows down on fish, washes it down with beer, and watches the tapes back on his television, mounted on the wall in his boat kitchen, which looks an awful lot like a diner. It’s a simple life for a simple man, whose cabinet of videotapes suggests he’s been at this game for a minute.

The central focus of the film is a nomadic surfer named Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who lives out of her van and prides herself on not getting attached to any specific person nor place. She meets a young man named Moses (Josh Heuston) at a gas station, and he is in need of jumper cables. She reluctantly gives him some assistance, and before long, the two unfairly attractive twentysomethings are hooking up. Zephyr leaves him high-and-dry in the wee hours of the morning in order to catch the perfect wave. She doesn’t even get her board out of her van before Tucker gets his hands on her.

Hassie Harrison throws herself into her performance much like Lively did in The Shallows. Shark movies ask a great deal of their leads because the roles require pragmatic physicality, which Harrison has in spades. Her brawn is only exceeded by her brains, as Zephyr isn’t one of those horror movie characters who is pervasive in making questionable decisions. Furthermore, you simply never have seen Jai Courtney like you have here. Courtney — who rocks unbuttoned, Margaritaville-esque shirts to show off his bulging beer gut — is menacing, a truly terrifying presence who is so delightfully unhinged that you cannot take your eyes off of him.

Come to think of it, while the premise recalls Wolf Creek, only on the water, Courtney’s Tucker would probably have a lot to discuss with John Jarratt’s Mick Taylor over a couple of beers.

Byrne and screenwriter Nick Lepard don’t get cute by monkeying with the chronology nor the pacing of Dangerous Animals. However, it’s a deceptively tricky premise for them to tackle because the paths Zephyr can take aren’t explicitly clear. She’s kept captive in the basement of the boat, and the boat is often in the middle of the ocean, with only a psychopath on board, and no one within earshot to hear her screams. The physical confrontations between Tucker and Zephyr are exceptionally captured, and after the disaster that was Fight or Flight, I needed my faith restored in basic blocking and fight choreography. The blows to the head, shanks to the stomach, harpoon to the chest, and broken bones have a visceral crunchiness, grungy enough to make you squirm.

Cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe makes beauty out of an ugly premise predicated on survival. She photographs the hell out of the water, shooting with a deep color saturation that makes the water appear a deeper blue and the vastness of the ocean look so pristine yet so haunting. Composer Michael Yezerski shoots for a retro film score that doesn’t draw attention to itself, but makes you recall early creature features that played into an engaged audience’s sensibilities by heightening their tension with rising synths and eclectic compositions. The Loved Ones director deserves a lot of credit, but he also assembled a gang of talented individuals who know the ingredients of an intelligent work of genre filmmaking.

Starring: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Rob Carlton, Ella Newton, and Liam Greinke. Directed by: Sean Byrne.