Since the 1975 release of Steven Spielberg’s beloved blockbuster Jaws, a slew of filmmakers have attempted to capture the same terror. From 1999’s Deep Blue Sea to 2016’s The Shallows, all these films have failed to conjure half the heart and atmosphere Jaws has, suffering from poor acting, writing, or the blatant overuse of CGI (or all three).
Sean Byrne’s 2025 survival horror flick, Dangerous Animals, challenges the long-standing pattern of subpar shark movies and offers a stylish, gruesome story that excels by putting sharks on the back burner and human brutality in the forefront.
Street-savvy Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is a young American surfer living out of her van in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. After a one-nighter with kindhearted, fellow surfer Moses (Josh Heuston), she’s kidnapped by boorish serial killer Tucker (Jai Courtney in his best performance to date, channeling a slightly wackier version of John Jarratt’s Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek).
Tucker operates a shark cage/diving tourist trap aimed at unsuspecting, thrill-seeking travelers. When he takes these customers out into the deep blue, he straps them to a harness, lowers them into the water, and feeds them to bull sharks and great whites—as he records their deaths with his clunky, vintage video camera.
What’s most refreshing about Dangerous Animals is that its protagonist is smart, stealthy, and doesn’t make any eye-roll-inducing decisions. Zephyr thinks on her feet, allowing the movie to keep up a quick pace, and allows the stakes to be raised the full runtime. Harrison’s acting here feels real.
It’s also a relief to see a shark horror flick that refuses to villainize its sharks. Too many modern films portray these breathtaking fish as bloodthirsty, human-devouring monsters. Sure, Jaws did it first, but it worked because Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper reasoned the shark’s behavior with the rogue shark/territoriality theory (which has since become a myth to modern-day marine biologists).
In the films that followed, even in recent years, sharks have been perpetually seen as the villain, despite us humans knowing better.
Animals flips this narrative to focus on the truly most dangerous animal on Earth—man.
Courtney’s Tucker is a formidable villain who leans into campiness; he’s the kind of freak who dances in his underwear while drinking a bottle of cheap wine and calmly devours a whole fish for dinner while watching snuff films. The Aussie actor excels here and becomes one of the most memorable bad guys in recent horror. He’s droll but frightening, and his blatant disregard for human life offers the audience some gruesome, unforgiving kills (though I would have loved to see a little bit more of them).
I would be remiss to not highlight two things here. Michael Yezerski’s score, which is a brutal, searing soundtrack that makes your stomach drop, and Ella Newton’s performance.
The young British actress portrays Heather, a meek English tourist who eagerly collaborates with Zephyr on escaping Tucker’s clutches. She’s got a hell of a scream, and I would love to see her in more horror films.
The only thing I can knock Dangerous Animals for is its predictable ending, which I won’t spoil here. Sure, it’s a little “been there, done that,” but it’s okay that it was predictable. If it ended any other way, I think I would’ve been disappointed.
Dangerous Animals is a blast—a memorable, nail-biting horror survival flick that makes you more afraid of man than anything that’s swimming around in the sea.
Dangerous Animals
2025
dir. Sean Byrne
93 min.
Opens Friday, 6/6 @ Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport and AMC Boston Common, Causeway, and South Bay
