DANGEROUS ANIMALS - Mark Reviews Movies

Dangerous Animals, Independent Film Company

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

The premise of Dangerous Animals revolves around an idea so demented that maybe it's for the best that Nick Lepard's screenplay settles into the rhythms and plotting of a typical thriller. It's a fine thriller, to be sure, that gets better as the film finds ways to expand and escalate its somewhat-restricted setting and stakes, but the thing that everyone will likely remember about director Sean Byrne's film is its villain.

That's not because of who Bruce Tucker (Jai Courtney) is. He's essentially a serial killer with a god complex, a bad habit of making jokes in deadly situations of his own devising, and a clichéd scene in which he dances in some state of undress to make sure we know the guy isn't all there. This is a character for whom less would certainly be more, both in terms of Lepard's writing and Courtney's performance, because not a single one of these details about this man can compare to the utterly twisted way in which he prefers to kill his victims. He feeds them alive to sharks.

Honestly, it ultimately might be better that Coutrney's performance is so over-the-top and that Lepard's script does turn this character into a more generic sort of villain as things progress here. To think of this kind of character and this modus operandi played straight and with the genuine horror such an act would entail in reality is almost a bit too much in the department of the darkness of which humanity is capable.

Now that Lepard has put that idea into a film, it's a bit of a shock to realize that nobody, apparently, came up with this particular conceit as the gimmicky method of a movie serial killer. Then again, it's entirely possible someone else did, believed it to be too awful or downright silly, and simply let the notion fade without writing it into a script.

Lepard did write it down, though, and, with Byrne, has made a thriller that, in every other part of its storytelling, can't escape or surpass its genuinely terrifying hook. The film does benefit significantly from it, however. Once one sees a young woman dangled into the ocean and ripped apart by a school of sharks, it's not exactly an image one is hoping to witness again.

Bruce is the entry point into this twisted tale, as he runs a shark-diving business for tourists on Australia's Gold Coast, takes a couple who missed a group trip to a corporate marine theme park out to the open waters, tells them the story of how he was almost killed by a shark as a child, and gives them the experience of a lifetime. After getting the two in an underwater cage to watch sharks swim around and over them, Bruce kills the guy and takes the woman captive.

From there, we meet another inevitable captive for Bruce. She's Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a wandering surfer who lives out of her van, has no family of whom to speak, and just exists to catch as many waves as possible. Zephyr meets Moses (Josh Heuston), a local guy whose car needs a jump. The two hit it off well enough that, when Zephyr is ambushed by Bruce in a beachside parking lot at night, Moses is smitten enough to try to find out why she seems to have disappeared.

Those are mechanics for later, of course, and as contrived as they seem in the early stages of the plot, they pay off with surprising efficiency later. After all, Lepard has basically written himself into a corner with this initial setup, since Zephyr and that first woman, named Heather (Ella Newton), are more or less helpless—locked away and chained to cots in a watertight compartment of Bruce's boat. It doesn't seem as if there's anywhere for the women or, for that matter, the story to go from there, and in one respect at least, that's entirely accurate. We do, after all, need to see what Bruce does to his victims (All things considered, the film has a surprisingly genuine respect for sharks as more than creatures to be feared) and start hoping that Zephyr is clever, resourceful, and strong enough to avoid the same fate.

She is to some extent, obviously (Harrison's performance is a subtle, grounded counter to her co-star's malicious eccentricities, too), or else, this would be a very short movie. However, Lepard's screenplay is fairly smart and creative, as well, in the way it has Zephyr try to outwit and outmaneuver her foe within the cramped space of this hold and in the slightly bigger arena of the boat. Meanwhile, it also follows Moses' investigation into her disappearance and actually incorporates the resulting search into what Bruce can and cannot accomplish, and along the way, the script comes up with some other logical reasons for Bruce to delay his wicked plans for his captive.

The strength of Dangerous Animals, in other words, isn't just in the horrific novelty of its gimmick. That premise is striking enough—to put it mildly—to grab our attention but doesn't overshadow the other mechanics of the script. It's tightly constructed, and Byrne's sense of momentum keeps us from thinking too much about the absurdities and contrivances of plotting that's so inherently confined in terms of space and limited in terms of characters, who are intelligent enough to stay ahead of each other and any questions the audience might have about what they do or don't do in a given situation. We can't ask for much more of a thriller.

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