Dangerous Animals Is A Sharksploitation Thriller For The Ages
Shudder’s latest gleefully flips the shark-attack thriller on its head.
Few things are more refreshing than a horror movie that knows exactly what it wants to be. Dangerous Animals is under no illusions about its true nature: it may be the latest addition to the sharksploitation genre, but it’s more sympathetic to the sharks than it is to the humans obsessed with their destructive power. The ocean predators aren’t even the true villains here — instead, they’re the tools through which Bruce Tucker (a delightfully menacing Jai Courtney) can enact his sick fantasies in the open water.
We meet Tucker, the curator of a diving experience on the Australian coast, as he ferries his latest group of tourists to swim with the sharks. Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton) have only just met, but their one-night stand in a nearby hostel reveals all we need to know about the chemistry between these relative strangers. It doesn’t take them long to warm up to Tucker, either: he’s properly charming, if a little rough around the edges, but one could easily chalk that up to the shark attack he survived as a child. It left him with a gnarly scar and a reverence for the predators that borders on worship — but when he murders Greg and confines Heather in the bowels of his boat, that affinity takes on a darker edge.
Courtney is clearly having a ball as Tucker. The actor seamlessly oscillates between scruffy himbo-ism and the deeply sinister savagery lurking just beneath the surface. His performance, paired with Sean Byrne’s intuitive directing and Nick Lepard’s airtight script, offers us a window into a disturbed mind and the ritual he feels compelled to complete.
Watching a human lose their life to a shark is an event Tucker is dedicated to capturing, and as many times as possible. He calls it “the greatest show on earth” — even if he has to trick these sharks, disinterested as they are in human flesh, into performing it. Courtney embodies that obsession, and that total emotional bankruptcy, with every fiber of his being, turning in a performance that’s as visceral as it is physical.
That said, he does meet his match in Hassie Harrison’s Zephyr. She’s a spunky, free-spirited surfer who doesn’t think about much besides the next wave, but there’s a chance that a handsome real estate agent named Moses (Josh Heuston) could finally get her to slow down. Their meet-cute is the first of a few detours from Dangerous Animals’ bloody statement of intent, but it’s crucial in establishing some emotional stakes.
Before Moses, Zephyr had nothing and no one. A former foster child who’s bounced from home to home — and even, briefly, juvie — she’s a bit like a shark in her own way. Her promising bond with Moses is the first thing that softens her barbed defenses. When she’s inevitably captured by Tucker, the idea of the life she might deserve is one of two things fueling her escape. (The other, of course, is the desperate need to get away from the man trying to feed her to sharks.)
Tucker meets his match in Zephyr, making for a gnarly game of cat-and-mouse.
And boy, does Zephyr fight to escape. Her past ordeals have sharpened her into a hyper-capable tool, and she makes quick work turning Tucker’s operation inside out. But slipping from her constraints and making it back to the mainland is still a near-impossible ordeal, one that Dangerous Animals explores in as many iterations as it possibly can. At just 90 minutes, it’s a taut thriller, but Byrne packs it to the gills with one brush with mortality after the next. It doesn’t matter how close Zephyr gets to freedom: as Tucker says, she’s caught on his line, and as long as he’s still breathing, he’ll find a way to pull her back in. The film is filled with many such allusions to fishing and marine life, most delivered by Courtney. But his conviction reels this story back whenever it strays into sillier territory — he even makes the lyrics of “Baby Shark” suitably spine-chilling.
Tucker and Zephyr’s dueling determination makes for a nonstop game of cat-and-mouse — but as Zephyr’s methods become more desperate and Tucker’s more bloody, Dangerous Animals does lean a bit repetitive. You’re left wondering how much more either of these characters can really take, and how much more Byrne can spin out of this simple premise before it truly runs out of fuel. Fortunately, his cast makes it impossible to look away. The sharks circling in the waters underfoot are properly menacing, and depicted with some stunning underwater photography. In Dangerous Animals, however, they’re here to remind us that there’s almost nothing scarier than a dude too into his hobbies.
