After decades of watered-down shark films, "Dangerous Animals" rips the genre wide open with something far more terrifying than teeth. What begins as a standard cage-diving trip uncoils into a brutal, meticulously staged nightmare at sea—where the real predator isn’t circling below but standing on deck, charming, calculating, and holding a camcorder. Director Sean Byrne weaponises the open ocean with surgical cruelty, delivering a film that doesn’t just revive the creature feature—it strangles it, guts it, and feeds it back to you raw. This isn’t a survival story. It’s a snuff performance, and you’re locked in from the first frame.
Director Sean Byrne, whose earlier work "The Loved Ones" danced gleefully in the mouth of madness, has returned with something leaner, meaner, and significantly wetter. This isn’t just a survival horror or a creature feature—it’s a twisted little snuff opera at sea. The shark is not the antagonist. That title belongs, without question, to Tucker, played by Jai Courtney like he’s just emerged from a decade-long fever dream of testosterone, old camcorder footage, and gore-soaked sadism.
He is—uncomfortably—excellent. He’s charming, hilarious, horrible. You want to look away from what he’s doing, but he won’t let you. The camera won’t let you. And it’s not just any camera—he’s using a retro VHS camcorder, capturing every torn limb, every underwater scream, every feeding frenzy he personally orchestrates. Because this is a man who doesn’t just kill—he directs, and rewatches later.
That’s what makes "Dangerous Animals" so uniquely horrifying. Not the sharks, not the blood, but the calculated performance of it all. There’s something deeply rotten in watching a man turn death into spectacle, editing human suffering in his mind before it even happens. And when one of the film’s most gut-wrenching scenes arrives—Tucker filming Heather as she's devoured in real time—it doesn’t play out like a cheap kill. It feels grotesquely intimate. Not just the violence, but the way the camera lingers. You’re not watching a movie anymore. You’re trapped on that boat, too.
And yet, it’s not mindless brutality. Byrne injects purpose into every scream, every splash of blood, and even manages to comment on our perception of predators. The sharks aren’t evil here. They're animals. Hesitant, sometimes confused. It’s Tucker who turns them into weapons. He bleeds the water deliberately, taunts them, dangles his victims just out of reach until the ocean has no choice but to comply. The monsters aren’t circling below—they’re steering the f*cking boat. It’s a clever reversal, one that lets Byrne play with the tropes of the genre while offering something that feels surprisingly… grounded. There’s even a bitter streak of animal rights sentiment running just beneath the surface. Who’s feeding who? it asks.
Visually, it’s grimy in all the right ways. It’s as if the whole movie has been run through sea salt and dried blood, and been left out in the sun for hours. The ocean looks less like a postcard and more like a waiting mouth. The kills are unflinching. There’s no PG-13 coyness here. Bones snap. Skin splits. Screams gurgle into silence. The violence doesn’t cut away because Tucker wouldn’t cut away. And you sit there, roped to your seat, just like the girls are roped to that deck.
But this isn’t just a showcase for violence—it’s a story of survival, too. And the final act, though flirting with familiar tropes, never loses its pulse. Hassie Harrison, as Zephyr, brings something raw and increasingly unhinged to the role of the would-be survivor. You see her brain working, burning calories with every decision. There’s a real sense of fight—not the Hollywood kind, but the kind that comes from desperation and adrenaline and knowing that the next hour might be your last.
There’s a moment toward the end where the ocean, once a silent accomplice, finally turns. And it’s earned. You want it to. After everything we’ve seen—after the blood and the horror and the haunting VHS footage—you want the sea to swallow something.
"Dangerous Animals" doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It drowns it. Pulls it into the deep and films the bubbles rise. It’s furious, relentless, sometimes almost too much—but in a genre gasping for fresh water, this one sinks its teeth in. It’s been years since a shark film felt this visceral, this alive, and ironically, this human. Because the real horror isn’t the beast beneath. It’s the man smiling above it.
And when Tucker looks down the lens—when you realise you’re watching him watch his victims—you’ll never trust a cage-dive tour again.
8/10
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