Dangerous Animals (2025)

The premise of Sean Byrne's Dangerous Animals could be described as Silence of the Lambs (1991) meets Jaws (1975). But that would be doing a great disservice to both those films and give Byrne's film far too much credit.

Many critics have praised Byrne's films for its nastiness and its exploitational roots, as well as the performances; and these are all positives I admittedly can't deny-to a point. Hassie Harrison is decent as bad-ass surfer Zephyr, who travels aimlessly around in her van looking for places to surf. She clearly has baggage, and we can immediately feel it when she meets the nerdy (but clearly intelligent and wealthy) Moses, played astutely by Josh Heuston.

After one night together, he makes her breakfast but by the time he brings it to her, she's gone- clearly scared of any sort of connection the pair might have promised. This is where it all goes wrong- whilst down by the seemingly deserted beach, Jai Courtney's Tucker kidnaps her, and the next thing she knows, she's on his boat- and thanks to the film's sort of prelude, we know where this is going.

Tucker offers people the chance to swim with sharks as his business, but how he keeps it running we have no clue- mainly due to the fact it seems that he feeds all his clients to sharks, films them, and keeps the evidence on VHS tapes on his boat.

The films is essentially a stripped down, nuts and bolts sharksploitation film; certainly not something we've never seen before, but supposedly this one has genuine teeth. Unfortunately, once we reach the crux of the story, there's absolutely nothing to get your teeth into. The gore is present, but even that is far from the bloody bone crunching of something like Saw (2004), a film that Dangerous Animals tips its hat too but never gets near.

The serial killer element of the film is interesting in principal, and Courtney is easily the film's trump card- he is absolutely relishing every moment he's on screen. But because he's easily most interesting thing in the film, it's frustrating that we get next to no backstory on him. Instead, we're eventually asked to sympathise with Zephyr- but it's seemingly for the obvious reason of her being kidnapped by a madman and not her rather uninteresting personal choices.

By this point we're baying for blood, but it's Moses who inexplicably turns up- and while the pair of them become prisoners and talk about their problems, we just want a bloodbath. Dangerous Animals is without doubt a piece of exploitation, but it far too frequently tries to pretend its not, and it would have been much more successful if it had stuck to its guns. I've heard people claim it's really really nasty- but that's only the case if you view it as a mainstream release.

Of course technically it is a mainstream release- and therein lies the problem. It might very well be bloody for the average cinema goer, but this should be crass exploitation fodder, especially with such a fine performance from Courtney at the center of it.

Sharksploitation is fifty years old if you consider Spielberg's Jaws the dawn of the sub-genre, and it's only to be expected that alongside anniversary screenings of Spielberg's behemoth there would be some sort of cash in in terms of new sharks on our screen- and Dangerous Animals fits the bill.

But we're actually luckier than we might think over the last couple of decades in terms of sharks in film. Bait (2012), The Shallows (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017); these are all sharksploitation films that know exactly what they are, and offer us as much.

Dangerous Animals, despite its decent critical showing, can't quite decide what it wants to be. And with its thoroughly engaging premise and terrific central turn from Courtney, it ends up being a real disappointment, especially with the unwelcome and highly telegraphed ending. It's fine, but it's not much more than that. 5.4/10