In 1975, Steven Spielberg created and killed the shark movie genre all in one fell swoop. Jaws emerged out of nowhere to become Hollywood’s first “blockbuster” movie and changed the nature of filmmaking itself, inspiring a slew of imitators and transforming the summer from a dumping ground for B-movies into a showcase for cinematic spectacle. But while countless shark movies have followed in Jaws’ wake, none of them have ever come close to capturing the magic of Spielberg’s vision.
Then, 50 years after Jaws (give or take a couple of months), director Sean Byrne (The Devil’s Candy) and screenwriter Nick Lepard (Keeper) finally charted the course through shark-infested waters by turning the entire concept of the shark movie on its head. Dangerous Animals asks a simple question: What if the monster isn’t the sharks at all, but man? The answer is downright terrifying.
Dangerous Animals opens at sea. A young couple on vacation hire Tucker (Suicide Squad actor Courtney Jai) to take them shark-cage diving off Australia’s Gold Coast. Tucker lowers them into the water, where dozens of sharks swim peacefully. After a brief freakout, the couple bask in the awesome majesty of nature’s most efficient killer.
Eventually, Tucker pulls them back to the surface and onto his boat. Then, with one quick, emotionless maneuver, he kills the young man with a knife and tosses him back into the ocean as shark food. The woman screams, and Dangerous Animals begins.
Hassie Harrison stars ppposite Jai as an American drifter named Zephyr. While she looks like a harmless blonde scream queen, Zephyr is anything but. She’s “tough as nails,” as Tucker later says with a smile, after forcibly bringing her to his boat as the next victim in his twisted game of shark-enabled murders.
As Tucker’s sick plan comes into focus, Jai pulls off a highwire performance, shifting seamlessly between toxic Reddit bro-speak as he spouts shark facts to no one in particular and full-on unhinged dancing-by-myself lunacy. At one point, a dog barks at Tucker, so he gets down on all fours and barks back. In almost any other movie, that might seem absurd or play for laughs. Here, it’s just terrifying.
Harrison matches Jai with pure ferocity. From the moment Zephyr wakes up on the boat, she uses every tool at her disposal to escape. This ultimately verges into body-horror territory as she attempts to free herself from a pair of handcuffs by any means necessary. Zephyr feels like a worthy hero who might actually have a chance against a demented serial killer twice her size.
Byrne captures all of this with muscular camerawork, never wasting a single shot. The boat’s claustrophobic interior ratchets up the tension of several brutal, messy fight scenes. The endless horizon of the ocean fuels the dread that Tucker’s victims experience. Like in space, no one can hear you scream out at sea.
Tucker’s ultimate scheme involves lowering his female victims into the ocean and watching the sharks do his dirty work for him as he captures each kill on an old camcorder. In the film’s most graphic moments, Byrne lets us watch the action through that camera. The fuzzy, crackling filter adds an extra dose of realism to each on-screen death.
Last year, when I interviewed Byrne to commemorate Jaws’ 50th anniversary, he described the moment he first read the script for Dangerous Animals and realized it needed to be his next movie.
“It was the first original shark film since Jaws,” Byrne said. “Because the shark isn’t the monster. Man is the monster. We are the monster.”
Whether Dangerous Animals is actually the first original shark movie in 50 years isn’t quite so clear-cut. Plenty have tried, and some have even managed to break through. (The Sharknado franchise is dumb, but it’s popular.) Still, there’s no denying that Byrne and company crafted something special here — finally, someone managed to get out from Jaws’ long shadow by rejecting that story’s basic premise in the first place.
Dangerous Animals is streaming now on Hulu.
