Film Review: Dangerous Animals (2025) - Australia / USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
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The sea has always been a mirror for our deepest fears – vast, unknowable, and teeming with ancient predators. Sean Byrne’s “Dangerous Animals” doesn't just glance into that abyss; it plunges us headlong, chaining us to a nightmare vessel where two primal horrors converge. This isn't merely a thriller; it's a pressure cooker welded shut and tossed into the deep, delivering one of the most relentlessly tense and conceptually audacious genre exercises of the year, bearing the unmistakable, visceral stamp of the director behind “The Loved Ones”.
The premise is deceptively simple, yet chillingly fertile ground. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison, radiating a sun-bleached resilience), a soul seeking freedom on the Australian waves meets her love in the form of Moses (played by Josh Heuston), finds her idyll shattered by Tucker (Jai Courtney, in a chilling charisma display). He’s not your garden-variety psycho. Moses is an apostle of the apex predator, a man whose psychosis manifests in a perverse communion with the great whites circling his grotesque, custom trawler. His victims aren't just killed; they are offered. The circling sharks become his jury, his executioners, the unholy instruments of a ritual born from a twisted worship of nature’s most efficient killers.
What elevates “Dangerous Animals” beyond its high-concept hook is the terrifying plausibility Courtney, Heuston and Harrison bring to this oceanic hellscape, orchestrated by Byrne’s knack for pushing performers to raw, desperate places. Courtney’s Tucker is a revelation. He sheds any action-hero vestiges to embody a man whose calm, almost logical devotion to his monstrous creed feels terrifyingly lived-in – a chilling echo of the polite sadism Byrne explored so effectively in “The Loved Ones”. Opposite him, Harrison is a force of nature. Her Zephyr isn’t just fighting for survival; she’s fighting for her very soul against an encroaching, watery madness, embodying the fierce, battered resilience Byrne often draws from his central protagonists. Her performance is a masterclass in conveying sheer, desperate willpower – every flinch, every calculated glance, every surge of adrenaline-fueled defiance feels raw and real. Their dynamic, a lethal dance on a stage where the floor could literally give way to death, is Byrne’s terrifying engine.
Byrne understands that true horror resides in the space between the attacks, but also in the grotesque beauty of the grotesque itself. He wields the vast, indifferent expanse of the ocean like a weapon, recalling the isolating dread of his earlier work. The horizon is an unbroken line of hopelessness; the sun beats down with cruel indifference. The trawler is a character – rusted, groaning, a floating prison dwarfed by immensity. And then there’s the water. The underwater cinematography is breathtakingly beautiful and deeply unnerving, finding the terrifying elegance within the monstrous. We don’t just see the sharks as menacing silhouettes; we see them in their terrifying, graceful reality – ancient, powerful, and utterly devoid of malice. They simply are.
Is it intense? Unrelentingly so. This is not for the faint of heart. But its power isn’t solely derived from shock. Its power comes from its masterful orchestration of atmosphere, its committed, powerhouse performances wrung taut by Byrne’s direction, and its chillingly original fusion of two potent horror strands. It’s a film that stares into the dark heart of nature and the darker heart of man, finding them disturbingly compatible, a bleak fascination Byrne renders with grim artistry. “Dangerous Animals” doesn’t just scare you; it haunts you. It leaves you feeling adrift long after the credits roll, grateful for the solid ground beneath your feet, and profoundly unsettled by the depths, both literal and figurative, Sean Byrne dared to explore. A near-flawless execution of a brilliantly savage premise by a master of discomfort. (Neo, 2025)