Sean Byrne apparently makes one good movie every decade (give or take). The Loved Ones is a brutal gut punch of a backwoods psychos story. The Devil’s Candy is a brutal gut punch of a family possession thriller. And now we have Dangerous Animals. It’s my 5th movie of an intended 31 for the 2025 spooky season. Does it live up to the bar set by Byrne’s previous efforts? Well, let’s get into it, shall we?
Zephyr is a nomadic 20-something surfer living out of her van and subsisting on paid-for bread rolls and stolen ice cream. (totally realistic diet for a fit young woman) She spends a meaningful night with Moses after helping him jump his car. Then she “does a runner” on him to go catch some pre-dawn gnar-gnar waves. Besides, she’s a loner. A rebel. She is snatched by Tucker in the parking lot. He’s a shark tour boat operator and serial killer. His preferred method of murder is death by shark. As Zephyr fights for survival on his boat, Moses searches for her. Will he find her before it’s too late? Or will Tucker add another VHS to his collection of homemade snuff films?
Has Byrne done it again? Yes. This film is another gut punch of a story. It’s gritty and harrowing in all the best ways. Ways that Australian horror films often nail. And, like Wolf Creek, we have a pitch black evil man terrorizing and killing young people. In this case, it happens to be at sea (mostly). Jai Courtney’s Bruce (wink wink wink wink) Tucker is singularly focused, unreasonable, and deadly. Exactly what most people think sharks are. And most shark movies leverage that fear by centering the shark as the deadly antagonist. Not all of them, but most. Dangerous Animals features sharks killing people without making them into the bad guys. It seems hard to believe, but Tucker even says they are just behaving naturally and according to their conditioning to swim up to tour boats to be fed. He is the bad guy. No doubt about it. In fact, the marketing makes this obvious with a “You’re safer in the water” tagline. And Zephyr is a resourceful and determined captive. She goes to extreme (like, really extreme) lengths to escape and/or get a shot in on Tucker. It makes for a thrilling experience. We all have an idea of how the story will turn out but we can never be sure that it will end the way we think it will. So, we chew our nails and root for our audacious protagonist until the credits roll. Isn’t that just what we want from our horror movies?
The Final Cut:Dangerous Animals is another harrowing story from Sean Byrne that is sure to please even the most jaded of horror fans.
No Real Danger 