Australian genre filmmaker Sean Byrne has previously made The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy, which weren’t theatrical successes here in America, but were well-regarded among horror fans. His latest film Dangerous Animals is a film I admittedly did not know much about prior to entering the theater, but decided to check out due to its positive early reviews out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. While I don’t think this film will break new ground in the horror genre, I think there is a lot here that fans of this filmmaker and fans of the survival horror movie will enjoy. 

Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is an American living in Australia, a surfer who lives mostly out of her van. She meet cutes with the charming and wealthier Moses (Josh Heuston) and makes a plan to go surfing with him. But before that, she is kidnapped by the sociopathic Tucker (Jai Courtney), who owns a business that allows tourists to be enclosed into a cage and ‘swim’ with sharks. And then he’ll dump his victims into the ocean when sharks are swirling and film their deaths for his own entertainment. Zephyr must find a way to survive this horror and defeat her kidnapper.

Your enjoyment of Dangerous Animals will depend almost entirely on whether or not you’re enjoying what Jai Courtney is doing here. He’s clearly having the time of his life playing this sadistic sociopath, and he’s leaning hard into the camp of this character. However, for me this got old quickly because it kind of felt like he was doing the same thing over and over again. The film’s central metaphor is obvious within the film’s first five minutes (what if humans are the real Dangerous Animals?!) and his character is very much an indictment of toxic masculinity and male privilege, and while I’m on board with all this film is saying on an intellectual level, it could have found more interesting avenues into the themes it aims to explore. 

I was not familiar with Hassie Harrison because I haven’t seen the show Yellowstone, but she makes a positive first impression. She’s a very capable lead, and she’s got great chemistry with Josh Heuston, who I had also never seen previously, but I understand he’s well-liked on the series Dune: Prophecy, which I intend to catch up with at some point. Both actors fit the bill of very pretty people in peril, but they’ve both got just enough personality to make the viewer care about what happens to them. 

Dangerous Animals gleefully leans into trashy B-movie genre tropes, and for a while it’s suspenseful, intense and really fun. It’s enjoyable to see this character attempt to escape from increasingly more complex traps and situations, but it kind of feels like we have the same sequence about two or three times in a row. And then where we end things is a little unsatisfying. The film just kind of ends on a shoulder-shrug moment during the climactic sequence and I would have liked to have seen an epilogue where we get to see what becomes of the survivor(s), but I can see that not really mattering to the average viewer. For a survivalist horror movie released in the summer, I think Dangerous Animals will be enough to satisfy genre fans, but maybe keep your expectations in check.