Dangerous Animals (2025)

Dangerous Animals arrives as a survival horror picture from Sean Byrne, in which a shark-obsessed boat captain named Tucker abducts a free-spirited surfer and lowers his victims into chummed water while a VHS camera whirs. It is a lean, mean, ninety-odd minutes of Australian coastal dread, and it has almost nothing to say. This is meant as praise. The film's ambitions are entirely mechanical: tighten the screws, keep the sharks real, and let Jai Courtney chew the scenery with the enthusiasm of a man who has been waiting his whole career for a speargun.

The protagonist, Zephyr, is a self-sufficient woman who bites off her own thumb to escape handcuffs and eventually dispatches her captor with his own weapon. That registers as a final-girl convention, not a thesis. She survives because the screenplay requires it, and the film never pauses to explain what her survival means about anything. The cast is largely white and Australian, with a small amount of incidental non-white presence, and nobody involved appears to have given the matter a second thought. There is no romance beyond a single night, no identity politics, no economic grievance, no sharks enlisted in service of a metaphor. The killer's unraveling is presented as plain villainy, the correct posture for a man who films drownings as a hobby.

We are left with a clean specimen. The film instructs no one, lectures no one, and would sooner show a real great white shot in 4K than tell us how to feel about the ocean. In an era of cinema that frequently arrives with a syllabus attached, this one arrives with a speargun and a box of tapes. Refreshing, if you like that sort of thing. I do.