Dangerous Animals

She’s aggressively a loner, but warms up to the sweetly persistent (and cute) Moses (Josh Heuston), with whom she spends one night. But instead of sticking around for the breakfast in bed he’s preparing, she yields to her bullheaded nature and runs away, which leads her directly into the grips of a serial killer (lesson #1: if there is a next time, maybe allow a little more room for exploring the possibilities of a legitimate romantic connection). Taken aboard the stranger’s boat, Zephyr is the planned victim-after-next in his sadistic feeding frenzy—a girl we meet in the chilling opening segment is up first—that he’ll film with his old-school VHS camera; these tapes provide his relaxation entertainment viewing.

What he doesn’t know is that for the first time in his killing career, he has likely met his match. Fearless Zephyr is unimpressed by his brutal dominance, and the nasty game of cat and mouse the two proceed to engage in is breathless. Yet her astounding endurance in a seemingly hopeless situation is not the most surprising element of the film; it’s that the sharks, always terrifying on-screen to the galeophobe (naturally, there’s a word for it!)—whether plastic models, real, CGI, or even fully animated—are not the villains here; they are just part of a sicko’s game, victims in their own way. There are even a few moments when the creatures come across as strangely peaceful and actually quite majestic.

The real threat here, of course, is the human killer. Captain Bruce Tucker, Gold Coast adventure tour guide, is one performative, jovial baddie (with some Billy Zane/Dead Calm sexy-villain-at-sea vibes). And Jai Courtney has a field day playing him. He must turn on enough charm to get people on his boat and sustain trust long enough for them to enter his shark cage (before lowering them into the water without any protective bars). And based on the size of his video collection, his techniques have been effective dozens of times.

High on energy and low in plausibility, Dangerous Animals retains little lasting evidence of the bodily harm Zephyr inflicts on Tucker, and her survival skills are almost superhuman—at one point adding nicely to the cinematic collection of creative ways to remove handcuffs without a key—especially when Moses comes back into the picture after his search efforts for his disappeared crush come to a head (lesson #2: some people are actually worth fighting, and living, for). Luckily, the film’s breakneck pace doesn’t provide much time to think about how someone as unhinged as Tucker could appear so grounded on cue, or how he could have gotten away with his fucked-up shenanigans for so long considering the high volume of missing tourists. It’s a testament to Byrne’s talents that such a simple, often absurd premise—this is the only one of his features he did not script—can play out in such a satisfying, exhilarating way. His efforts are adrenaline-rush cinema at its finest.