A serial killer employs sharks as his weapon of choice in Dangerous Animals, which played in the midnight movie section of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and will debut in Czech cinemas from August 21. This wild premise is approached with a disarming amount of sincerity by director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones), resulting in a movie that is better than it has any right to be—but one that might disappoint audiences tuning in for campy thrills.
But forget the sharks, and forget the story: there’s one element of Dangerous Animals that does provide the nuttiness implied by the film’s premise, and that’s Jai Courtney as the killer at its core. Following up a flavorful villain turn in Netflix’s American Primeval and memorable appearances in both Suicide Squad movies, Courtney has completely rebranded himself after failing to make much of an impact in Hollywood franchise fare like Terminator Genisys and A Good Day to Die Hard a decade ago.
In Dangerous Animals, Courtney is Bruce Tucker, whose ill intent is revealed from the film’s dynamite opening scene. Going for a shark-watching ride off Australia’s Gold Coast, Heather (Ella Newton) and Greg (Liam Greinke) soon discover it isn’t the sea creatures—glimpsed through a shark cage dangling off the back of Tucker’s boat—that they need to be afraid of. Instead, it’s the guide who—unprovoked and without warning—stabs Greg in the neck and kicks him overboard as bait.
Tucker gets his thrills through filming the shark attacks, and keeps Heather locked up below deck as he prepares for the next show. Oddly, he seems to film a lot of them at night, which means a lot of the film’s shark action gets lost in the darkness—though the mere knowledge of sharks being in the water, even if we can’t see them, creates a particular sense of dread. The killer’s role as filmmaker makes for an amusing diversion later in the film, when potential victims buy time by destroying his equipment and force him to look for a replacement before he can sate his appetite.
But Tucker is not the primary focus of Dangerous Animals. Instead, the screenplay follows Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American drifter and surfer—and, the film hints at, survivor of past abuse—who happens to be traveling through the area. Innocuous early scenes feature her meeting friendly Aussie Moses (Josh Heuston) at a convenience store, and if you walked into the movie after the shocking cold open, you might think this is a low-key romance.
But Zephyr also happens to cross paths with Tucker before she can hit the waves early one morning, and comes to chained up on his boat opposite Heather as the sicko lines up his next murder set pieces. The rest of the film is a deceptively straightforward survival thriller that pits the heroine against a particularly nasty threat—both on the boat, and in the water.
Dangerous Animals boasts some terrific location cinematography by Shelley Farthing-Dawe both on and off the Gold Coast, to go along with Byrne’s tight direction and Courtney’s menacing turn as the killer, which ends up dominating the film. And Harrison and Heuston also make for sympathetic protagonists whose characters get a little more time to develop than the usual movie of this type.
But—and this is odd for a film about a serial killer who feeds his victims to sharks—there’s a real lack of incident in Nick Lepard‘s screenplay. Once Zephyr finds herself captive aboard Tucker’s vessel, at about the half-hour mark, we know exactly where Dangerous Animals is headed. She tries a few methods of escape with limited degrees of success, but there’s just not enough going here—and no single story thread to latch onto—to maintain a sense of heightened tension until the expected conclusion.
Instead, the narrative gets a lot of mileage out of the developing relationship between Zephyr and her captor, who sees a bit of himself in his victim—yes, yes, they’re both sharks, the script spells out for us in case we didn’t get the metaphor. But thanks to the strong performances from both Courtney and Harrison, we’re more invested in these characters than we probably should be.
Dangerous Animals may not deliver the blood-soaked bite promised by its premise, but thanks to strong performances and slick visuals, it still manages to circle its audience with a certain menace. The pacing may drag and the tension may ebb, but there’s something fascinating about watching a film so earnest in its madness.
