Dangerous Animals (2025) by Sean Byrne is a suspenseful and innovative shark-and-human-predator duet with two outstanding lead performances.
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Dangerous Animals marks the triumphant return of Australian filmmaker Sean Byrne, who delivered two cult titles of recent genre cinema with The Loved Ones (2009) and The Devil’s Candy (2015). Ten years later, he’s back, and with a vengeance: His third feature premiered at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in Cannes, that sidebar program which has always demonstrated a keen instinct for robust, formally incisive genre cinema. This context alone suggests where the journey leads: Dangerous Animals is not another digitally bloated summer shark flick, but a carefully composed, sweat-drenched survival thriller that combines a taste for excess with stylistic precision.
Double Survival
The plot is no-frills and all the more effective for it: Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a nomadic surfer, is abducted on the open sea. Her captor Tucker (Jai Courtney) is a serial killer who transforms the ocean into his stage and sharks into instruments of his sacrificial ideology. He binds his victims, lowers them with macabre deliberation into blood-clouded water, and records the “ceremony” on video—not because Byrne wants to make his villain psychologically accessible, but to emphasize the ritualistic nature of his acts. Tucker is, like the best genre antagonists, sharply defined in his fixation yet only explained enough to fuel moral unease. The fact that the film doesn’t let its killer monologue endlessly is part of the concept: efficiency reigns here, not expository prose.
Jai Courtney gives Tucker a merciless, almost gleefully diabolical presence. It’s one of the rare roles in which the Australian, often typecast as rough sidekicks, plays with relishing malevolence without tipping into cartoonishness. Opposite him stands Hassie Harrison as Zephyr: a bundle of physicality, intuition, and laconic self-assertion. Harrison doesn’t play a “Final Girl” template, but an articulated willfulness that unfolds in micro-gestures—in the assessing glance, in the hesitation before the leap, in the poised calm. Between them unfolds a duel that Byrne choreographs as a maritime chamber piece: two outsiders, each bringing their own mythology of survival. The intensity of this showdown is the film’s true attraction.
Animal Horror Meets Serial Killer Film
However tempting the marketing hook of “shark horror” may be—the sea and its inhabitants function here less as antagonist than as moral resonance chamber. Byrne “quotes” Jaws (1975) in attitude, not manner: He’s interested in suspense, in topographical clarity, in displaying consequences, not in CGI bombast. The sharks appear as a force of nature, as the amorality of the deep; the true terror is man-made. When Tucker contemplates his shrine of newspaper clippings, it reads like a perverse communion that imagines the sea as deity and him as high priest. Dangerous Animals is thus an intelligent fusion of animal horror and serial killer film, but with the lustfully rough B-movie flair that suits Byrne so well.
Visually, the film finds an attractive balance between sun-drenched expanse and oppressive confinement. The Australian coastal landscape is established in high-contrast panoramas, only to trap Zephyr in the claustrophobic metal belly of Tucker’s boat. That Byrne is working with limited means is evident; but he turns it into a virtue: The film breathes that graspable, hands-on physicality that one misses in so many genre offerings. And when the waves crash together again at the end, you feel that cathartic satisfaction that only a cleanly composed genre finale can deliver.
The screenplay by Nick Lepard—a name worth remembering—is more tightly constructed than it first appears. Lepard takes time for the build-up, for casual encounters (Zephyr and young Moses), before shifting into a concentrated survival mode that allows barely any exits and escalates with dramaturgical precision. The script is clever in its set-ups and pays them off without redundant excess. Notably: Lepard is also responsible for Keeper (2025), Osgood Perkins’ next horror film—another indication that a new authorial voice is emerging in the genre cosmos.
Bottom line: An effective, tautly told, often nerve-shredding thriller that demythologizes the shark and exposes humans as the real beast. And one that simultaneously proves that Sean Byrne has lost none of his instinct for tone, rhythm, and edge. Dangerous Animals is genre cinema with teeth and attitude.