It’s fascinating and enlivening to watch how the fusion of two intensely familiar subgenres–serial killer thriller and shark-starring B-movie–can result in a work that is somehow brimming with life and verve. Like multiplying two negative numbers, the result (in this one instance, don’t get any copycat ideas) becomes positive, rendering buzzy Cannes survival horror flick Dangerous Animals as one of the summer’s most thrillingly visceral surprises. Anchored by a duet of extremely strong genre performances from final girl Hassie Harrison and especially the raw physicality of antagonist Jai Courtney–in a genuinely star-making turn–Dangerous Animals ascends to the top of this particular food chain, a glorified B-movie given appeal beyond its salacious premise through sharp filmmaking and even the occasionally lyrical aside. This is all so much better than “serial killer shark movie” has any right to be.
Nor is the film really any more than it promises: It eschews the need for narrative twists and relies on the elemental simplicity of its metaphor. Hunter vs. hunted. Fisherman vs. fish. Ideological mania vs. the pure determination to survive. We may lump it into the category of “shark movies,” which we’ve previously described as the lowliest of all horror subgenres, but in truth this is less genuinely an entry in that niche than something like 2016’s The Shallows, which represents the gold standard for modern shark films, perhaps the best in the half century since Spielberg’s Jaws launched the era of the summer blockbuster. Dangerous Animals is less purely “shark movie” and instead a tautly made serial killer psychological thriller, which just so happens to thematically weave itself around the grim outline of the ocean’s top predators. In truth, it revolves entirely around the considerably more viciously predatory nature of (male) human beings, as highlighted by a scintillating turn from its villain.
That cinematic heavy is Tucker (Courtney), an Australian adventure tour guide who makes his living taking tourists on pulse-quickening dives along the Great Barrier Reef in his shark cage, but also moonlights as a sadistic killer with a penchant for abducting women and feeding them to the fish he finds so captivating. A childhood shark attack survivor himself, Tucker seemingly absorbed an almost fanatical awe for the power of the natural world that didn’t quite finish him off when it could have, taking this as a mandate to capture that raw power via the mode of film: Like the killer of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, he takes hypnotic fascination with capturing the exact moment of death on screen. Tucker approaches this task with a zeal bordering on something holy, projecting a sense that he’s only a vessel, a facilitator running the camera, for something more important, more real than himself. He captures and preserves the footage of the predatory struggle, even though no one but himself will ever see it. And in American surfer/survivor Zephyr (Harrison), he’s finally found quarry with all the qualities that he believes will make for his masterpiece, a film surpassing all others. Despite this perhaps sounding like a feature length extension of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s classic invocation of “the implication,” it’s still the basis for a genuinely exhilarating thriller.
Dangerous Animals wouldn’t be half as engaging as it ends up being without its captivating turn from Courtney as Tucker. Having previously waded through action dreck like Suicide Squad and the Divergent series without making much of a splash on American screens, this time around the Aussie performer is given every opportunity to showcase an aura of absolute madness and menace. He’s a big brick of tanned charisma, disarming in his friendliness and forthrightness until the moments when he switches to pure psychopathy with terrifying alacrity. His ability to be magnetic–almost alluring–in one moment and then deeply threatening the next, is undeniably impressive. His physicality, likewise, is off the charts–in one moment, the secondary male protagonist (also extremely muscular) reaches back and delivers the cleanest punch imaginable to Tucker’s jaw, and Courtney simply walks through it without flinching, like the fist wasn’t even there. It’s an incredible moment to sell the character’s aura, which he counterbalances mentally with a single-track mind that can turn any plea for mercy into hilariously obtuse philosophical soliloquies about sharks. He’s extremely fun to watch.
Tucker is opposed, meanwhile, by a final girl who quite nearly manages to match him in terms of determination, ingenuity and ferociousness. Zephyr is a bit thinly characterized–your classic stick thin gal who pounds slushies, ice cream and cigarettes but magically looks like a model–a rebellious drifter on the run from her own reticence to trust others, but Harrison sells the ambivalence she experiences in craving human connection after a surprisingly sweet one night stand with Moses (Josh Heuston). This is naturally when she’s abducted by Tucker, which sends Moses searching for the girl who upended his world overnight: From his perspective it’s almost Paper Towns … you know, if the girl had been abducted by a serial killer. From the moment that Zephyr wakes up imprisoned in the bowels of Tucker’s boat, next to another young woman (Ella Newton) destined to become so much chum, Dangerous Animals never lets up as a ticking clock thriller, with Zephyr working from the inside as Moses hunts from the outside. Her attempts at escape are riveting even though we know intellectually that they can’t possibly be successful–few imprisonment thrillers end at the 45-minute point when the protagonist successfully nips out of the dungeon and calls the police on her captor. It’s a testament to director Sean Byrne’s (The Loved Ones) tight grasp of action and thriller dynamics that we can suspend our disbelief, time after time, as Zephyr nearly achieves her freedom with another clever would-be turning of the tables.
If there’s a particular film that Dangerous Animals ultimately evokes in many aspects of spirit, it’s something like The Silence of the Lambs rather than Jaws, and that’s not just in reference to Courtney’s half-nude dance, drunk on both power and booze, in clear reference to Buffalo Bill. Stylistically, there’s little in common with Jonathan Demme’s meticulous thriller, but the relationship that builds between Tucker and Zephyr does contain overtones of the repressed fascination that exists between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. What begins as a simple drive toward predation grudgingly turns into respect and something bordering on obsession. Tucker is a predator who has had a lot of relatively easy conquests in this violent pursuit. Not until now has he run across someone like Zephyr who genuinely challenges him, who poses as much threat to him as he does to her. It invigorates Tucker’s mental self image as the unrelenting sport fisherman in this for the thrill of the fight, with Zephyr as his dream marlin, the fish that will keep on fighting and renewing its struggle when any other one would have flopped over into the boat. She gives him everything he can handle, and more.
These conflicts are brought to life by sequences of violence and fight choreography that initially seems as if it will lean toward the pulpy and silly, but then becomes increasingly realistic and vicious in its impact. A turning point, perhaps, comes mid-film when we see the remains the next day after nocturnal shark feeding: A girl’s torso bobs in the water like a cork, the majority of her body eaten away, but the final agony still etched in what’s left of her face. We stare at it just long enough to consider that this chunk of a person was once a fully conscious human being, with all the attendant hopes and dreams that implies. It gives a little depth to Zephyr’s subsequent escape attempts–which include some hard-hitting, brutal stuntwork–when we’ve had it illustrated for us so starkly exactly what her fate would look like if she fails. If you’re going to have a character forced to willingly sacrifice one of their own body parts in order to escape, you’d better give them a damn good reason to do so.
At the end of the day, Dangerous Animals is just a well-spun, old-fashioned thriller, albeit one that even takes the occasional side jaunt into lyricism, as in the rousing finale sequence when Zephyr comes face to face with a titanic Great White Shark, experiencing a moment that reads almost like kinship. A lesser film would have simply thrown her to the fish, and made the ordeal of survival about overcoming a ravenous force of nature. This one understands that the malevolence of a wild animal can’t hold a candle to the delusion of a man who thinks he’s their equal. It’s the best serial-killer-who-makes-fly-lures-from-the-hair-of-his-victims good time at the multiplex you’ll have all summer.
Director: Sean Byrne Writer: Nick Lepard Stars: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton Release date: June 6, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.
