THE STORY – A shark-obsessed serial killer holds Zephyr, a rebellious surfer, captive on his boat. Racing against time, she must figure out a way to escape before he carries out a ritualistic feeding to the sharks below.
THE CAST – Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney & Josh Heuston
THE TEAM – Sean Byrne (Director) & Nick Lepard (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
It’s hard to make a good exploitation flick. Walking the line between depicting violence and promoting it is hard enough – making that violence watchable without losing the audience is a whole other matter. Even the best exploitation flicks can feel absolutely punishing to get through, whether because of Z-grade production values or unbearably cruel violence. Sean Byrne’s “Dangerous Animals,” premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, has some of the most impressive production values of any exploitation flick in recent memory. Granted, it’s almost impossible to make Australia’s Gold Coast look bad, but the film is so well-shot and edited that you begin to expect more than what the film actually has to offer in the story and character departments. In actuality, though, “Dangerous Animals” relies far too much on genre conventions to fully meet those expectations. However, the film’s mash-up of “Jaws” and “Peeping Tom” provides some slickly sick thrills that will more than satiate the appetite of genre fans.
Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a free-spirited American surfer living out of her van in Australia, doesn’t want any complications in her life. Due to her rough childhood in foster care, she doesn’t put much trust in people, but a random run-in with easy-going, charming real estate salesman Moses (Josh Heuston) turns into a date good enough that Zephyr almost lets down her guard before ultimately running away to catch some more waves. Unfortunately for her, she has another random run-in, this time with smarmy tourist boat captain Tucker (Jai Courtney), only this one ends with her getting knocked out, drugged, handcuffed, and held prisoner on Tucker’s boat. Once out in the ocean, Tucker ties her to a chair and forces her to watch as he lowers another young woman into the chum-laced, shark-infested waters below, filming everything as the sharks tear the young woman limb from limb. The implication is obvious: Zephyr will be fed to the sharks next unless she can find a way to get the upper hand. Will she be able to save herself from this psycho? Or will Moses, distraught by her disappearance, figure out what happened and save her himself?
Nick Lepard’s screenplay takes a generic exploitation framework and hangs a story full of twisted details on top. Zephyr is a classic genre heroine – tough but damaged, forced to endure a gauntlet of physical and psychic trauma in order to fully embrace life and love – and it’s easy to root for the grounded, charismatic Harrison. Looking like Jennifer Lawrence’s younger sister, Harrison adopts a demeanor similar to Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, with a hard shell built around a more melancholy interior. As the going gets tough for Zephyr, Harrison responds with a star-making performance, staking her claim as a classic Scream Queen. Unlike many horror heroines, Zephyr is resourceful right from the jump, so as soon as Tucker captures her, it’s only a question of how long it will take her to escape. The film never contrives too much, which keeps it from becoming too frustrating, but at a certain point, it does become as much of an endurance test for the audience as it is for Zephyr. As in any good exploitation flick, the camera lingers on the violence, forcing the audience to endure the agonized screams of the characters as the sharks do unspeakable things to their bodies. Much of the shark violence happens underwater and thus off-screen, but the bloody remains are fully visible, and if the intensity of the moment isn’t enough for you, the vision of the bloody aftermath surely will be.
Courtney is the ace up the film’s sleeve, portraying Tucker with single-minded intensity and a terrifying twinkle in his eye. While the character’s sadism is pretty standard fare (having survived a debilitating, but not fatal, shark attack as a kid, he has become obsessed with the aquatic apex predators and the fear they instill in his victims), Courtney’s performance is anything but, dispatching his victims with a chilling casualness that makes Tucker difficult to read; you’re never quite sure when he’s going to burst into violence, filling the film with suspense whenever he’s onscreen. Unfortunately, the film never really does anything with the character’s particular fetish other than noting it as such – yes, he takes a lock of hair from his victims and keeps it with each videotape, which he enjoys watching while eating a bowl of cereal, but the film doesn’t do anything with that. It only serves to add to Tucker’s creep factor, and he’s already plenty creepy without that detail. The screenplay gestures towards a larger thematic point about predators and prey and human survival instincts, but it’s relegated to Tucker’s mandatory big villain monologue.
Courtney goes big, reveling in the screenplay’s more outré elements, but the film takes itself too seriously to be as fun overall as Courtney’s performance is. While the screenplay dutifully wades through the shallow waters of every expected exploitation beat, there’s not even a trace of irony or self-awareness to be found. “Dangerous Animals” is as straightforward an exploitation flick as they come, putting the audience through the same gauntlet of pain as its characters. It’s a truly nasty, effective slice of exploitation in a setting that allows for some beautiful cinematography that belies the film’s schlocky heart. It may look alluring on the surface, but make no mistake: “Dangerous Animals” is a vicious piece of work, one that will make you sick to your stomach even as you cheer on its resilient, resourceful heroine.
