Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
I’m of two minds when it comes to dangerous animal movies. On the one hand, they are incredibly visceral. There’s something very lizard brain fearful about things like lions, grizzly bears, alligators, and sharks. Sharks might well be the most viscerally scary specifically because they live in a place where it feels like they can attack at any time. Of course, they don’t—shark attacks are incredibly rare. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a gut level reaction to the idea of shark attacks. Ever since Jaws came out, people have tried to reinvent the shark movie, usually without much success. But Dangerous Animals feels like the first film in some time to really rise to the challenge seriously.
Don’t take this as me saying that Dangerous Animals is in the same class as Jaws, because it isn’t. To be fair, most movies aren’t—it’s not just one of the greatest rogue animal movies or horror movies in history, it’s one of the greatest movies ever made. Dangerous Animals, though, has a lot going for it. The reason is that, for a wonder, it doesn’t make the sharks the bad guys. The sharks here are just sharks acting like they do. The true evil is human, and honestly, this is exactly the right way to do this kind of movie.
Wes Craven once said that if you can scare your audience in the opening scenes of a movie, you don’t really need to scare them again until the end, so we’re going to get that “here’s how the story works” moment in the persons of Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton), two people staying at a hostel in Australia who have opted to go for a “swimming with sharks” experience hosted by Tucker (Jai Courtney). Tucker tells them that his fascination with sharks started when he survived a shark attack as a child, and then we get to see Greg and Heather in the shark cage, watching them swim above them, having been attracted by Tucker chumming the water. We’re lulled into a sense of complacency, so when Tucker stabs Greg to death and pitches him over the side, it’s a bit of a shock.
We shift gears now to focus on Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American who lives in Australia essentially drifting from place to place and surfing. She meets up with Moses (Josh Heuston) and the two have a quick hookup, bonding over her jump starting his car and their shared love of surfing. Moses is clearly looking for something more, but Zephyr has decided that she’s better off alone, and while he makes her breakfast, she drives off to go surfing.
Can you guess what’s going to happen next? If you guessed that Zephyr is going to encounter Tucker and get abducted by him, you’d be right because that’s exactly what is going to happen. When she wakes up, she’s on Tucker’s boat, handcuffed to a bed, and in a room with Heather from the film’s opening. What we learn is that Tucker is a serial killer, and his weapon of choice is sharks. Essentially, he pilots his boat out to the middle of nowhere, chums the water to attract the sharks, and then lowers in a sacrifice to them, filming it so that he can relive it whenever he wants. We see this happen with Heather, knowing that Zephyr will be next. Meanwhile, Moses realizes that she has not just ghosted him, but has legitimately disappeared and starts to look for her.
Honestly, Dangerous Animals does just about everything right. The danger is absolutely real and strike precisely at the fight-or-flight part of the brain. Tucker is completely vicious and awful, the sort of person who is convinced that what he is doing has some sort of nobility while also being purely guilty of something completely horrible. If I have a complaint, it’s the fact that, true to moviedom, everyone in the film looks like an actor. Greg and Moses have chiseled, body builder physiques, for instance. I get it, but it is something that can pull me out of the story because it does feel artificial.
The movies that work on this sort of “fear of animal” plot can do this in a couple of ways. One is to make the animal itself actually evil and aggressive. The fear isn’t just that the animal has the ability to kill us, but that the animal itself is malicious. It wants to kill us and it wants us to suffer. The other way to do it is the way that makes much more sense, and what Dangerous Animals does. Tucker is the source of evil; the sharks are just sharks. They don’t have a moral stance here. They attack because there’s blood in the water and that’s what sharks do.
And this works because sharks can’t be bargained with. You can’t pay off a shark or make a deal with it. If someone like Tucker decides to feed you to them, he’s the weak link because the sharks aren’t.
My main complaint? Sean Byrne needs to speed up his production. Dangerous Animals came out in 2025 and his previous movie, The Devil’s Candy, came out in 2015, and The Loved Ones before that in 2009. He’s consistent with quality—now he needs to be consistent by putting something out every 18 months.
Why to watch Dangerous Animals: Sharks are scary.
Why not to watch: Sharks can’t help it that they are scary.
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