Sean Byrne’s “Dangerous Animals” is sharp in all the right places. It’s an efficient, clever genre mash-up that works because of how well Byrne blocks its action, employs an old-fashioned score, and directs his actors to visceral performances. It’s deceptively well-made; most will dismiss this “Jaws” meets “The Silence of the Lambs” flick as just another B-movie, but Byrne makes so many smart choices in every aspect of the production. After far too long a hiatus, the director of the excellent “The Loved Ones” and “The Devil’s Candy” is back with another kind of summer movie, a surprising Cannes addition (and the first Australian film in the program in over a decade) that deftly maneuvers its ship through choppy waters to a thoroughly entertaining destination.
Byrne wastes no time getting brutal. We’re introduced to a couple of tourists who basically stumble on a business venture run by the charmingly threatening Tucker, played perfectly by Jai Courtney. The “Suicide Squad” star understands the kind of guy who barely hides his menace underneath his outsider persona. He’s one of those guys who’s equally charming and disquieting. You gotta be a little weird to make a living swimming with sharks, right? Courtney leans into this question with a smirk and a side-eye, even as he’s stabbing the male tourist to death and kidnapping the female one. He has other plans for her.
It turns out that Tucker is a serial killer, one who uses literal sharks the way that Jason Voorhees uses a machete. A survivor of a shark attack at a young age—he keeps framed copies of the news stories about it on the wall of the bridge of his boat—Tucker has become obsessed with the predators under the water’s surface, convinced that they are almost like Gods who demand a sacrifice. He drugs women, harnesses them up, and slowly drops them into chum-spurned waters, videotaping what happens next. There’s a beat when Tucker lets out a small exhalation after the death of one of his victims, as if he’s only alive when his role as marine executioner has been satisfied, but Byrne and writer Nick Lepard are wise not to over-explain Tucker. This is an efficient piece of genre filmmaking that doesn’t drag the anchor of monologuing villains like many of its peers.
After the bloody set-up, Byrne rides a different wave, introducing us to the other outsider leading this survival thriller, a nomadic surfer named Zephyr (an effectively physical Hassie Harrison). Living out of her van, Zephyr has attachments to no one and nothing, which makes her skeptical of the young man named Moses (Josh Heuston) who is trying to get her attention in his quest for some jumper cables. He correctly clocks her as a “window person,” someone more reserved than folks who take the aisle, but these two beautiful people hook up anyway before Zephyr goes off before sunrise to find that perfect wave. That’s when Tucker finds her, and one outsider takes on another. For most of its run time, “Dangerous Animals” is Tucker vs. Zephyr, a one-on-one battle in a ring that happens to include sharks the size of VW buses.
From here, “Dangerous Animals” is a pretty straightforward survival thriller, which is a good thing. Lepard’s script doesn’t have a lot of paths to take—it’s not like they’re gonna run into other people in the middle of the night off the coast of Australia—which allows Byrne’s directorial chops to shine within the tight structure of the film. He blocks the action between Tucker and Zephyr precisely, avoiding the hyperactive editing and jump scares that often drag down the survival genre. He also doesn’t forget to get crunchy. Every knock on the head or punch to the face connects with visceral power, and, of course, we feel every pointy thing from hooks to harpoons to razor-sharp teeth (that often result in some ace horror makeup work). A brilliant, rousing score by Michael Yezerski is also essential, rising and falling with the action.
The first act of “Dangerous Animals” takes a bit longer than it needs to, and the film arguably has a few too many endings and fakeouts. Still, there’s something joyous about seeing a genre filmmaker taking the tools that great horror filmmakers have been using for years and applying them to such an admittedly goofy concept as the one here. The most frustrating thing about “Dangerous Animals” may be that it’s been a decade since Byrne’s last movie. He better not make us wait that long for him to surface again.
This review was filed from the Cannes Film Festival. It opens on June 6th.
