By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney and Josh Heuston
Directed by Sean Byrne
Written by Nick Lepard
Independent Film Company/Shudder
Sharks and serial killers feel like they’ve been the top two threats in the movies over the past couple of decades, so it’s only natural that a film has come along combining those subgenres. As the title of DANGEROUS ANIMALS hints, it’s a human who’s the deadliest species of all, as embodied by an actor who sinks his teeth into his role with a brio that any shark would envy.
That’s Jai Courtney, the Aussie who not too long ago was the hero of megafilms like TERMINATOR: GENISYS and A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, but here, working on home soil (or water) on a smaller scale, assures he’ll be steadily employed as nutters for at least the next decade. He plays Bruce (ahem) Tucker, who runs a Gold Coast cage-diving business off his boat, which has a couple of nasty surprises below decks. The opening minutes see him approached by a young couple who ignore a couple of obvious warning signs that Tucker is not in his right mind, and live (or not) to regret it.
We’re then introduced to surfer Zephyr, played by Hassie Harrison, who is best known from YELLOWSTONE and previously made an impression in the horror anthology SOUTHBOUND as a girl who doesn’t take a home invasion lying down. Zephyr possesses a similar resilience, born of years living as an unrooted free spirit chasing the perfect wave, though she does open herself up to a meet cute and a one-night stand with Moses (Josh Heuston). That night isn’t even over before she has a much less unpleasant date with Tucker, who kidnaps Zephyr and imprisons her in the bowels of his vessel, intent on making her the latest star in his series of videos in which he takes abducted women out to the open sea and feeds them to the finned predators.
This premise is vaguely similar to the utterly ridiculous SHARK NIGHT 3D, but it works here because it’s personalized in the savage figure of Tucker, who had a childhood shark encounter that left him with both large bite scars and an obsession with the killer fish. He considers them akin to gods, and himself akin to them, and Courtney’s full-throttle performance has you completely believing in, and unsettled by, his mania. He’s well-matched with Harrison, who scores as a young woman whose existence has also been defined by past traumas, but who demonstrates an unwavering survival instinct in her perilous circumstances.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS’ script by Nick Lepard (who also wrote Osgood Perkins’ upcoming KEEPER) does a nice job of building upon its simple premise in ways that keep the suspense tingling without upsetting basic plausibility. With limited settings and a very small ensemble, he keeps the story twisting in ways you don’t always see coming. When Moses starts suspecting that Zephyr has been subject to foul play, his investigation leads to a lengthy, violent setpiece that doesn’t pay off in the expected manner, and got a real rise out of the preview audience I saw the movie with. Director Sean Byrne, who previously helmed THE LOVED ONES and THE DEVIL’S CANDY and has been absent from the screen scene for too long (has it really been a decade since CANDY?), keeps the action taut and punchy while maintaining the emphasis on his two compelling leads and their physical and psychological cat-and-mouse game.
As for the sharks, they’re a key yet not considerable piece of this puzzle, mostly and sporadically seen as people in general would tend to see them: as grey shapes gliding ominously below the surface. While Byrne gets some old reliable here-comes-the-dorsal-fin suspense going, his sparing use of the bulls, makos, etc. (saving everyone’s favorite species for last) helps root DANGEROUS ANIMALS in the point of view of his protagonist and antagonist, seeing them as objects of fear and awe respectively. This is one of those films that sees sharks not as monsters but rather as predators simply doing what they naturally do; the key to Byrne and Lepard’s particular horror stems from the fact that here, they’re enthusiastically encouraged toward fatal behavior by a damaged human mind.
