Sean Byrne knows how to show an audience a bad time. Sixteen years ago, the Australian filmmaker launched onto the scene with “The Loved Ones,” his proudly grisly debut about a misfit teenager who gets gruesome revenge on the boy who refused to go to prom with her. Part expert torture porn, part exploration of adolescent romantic anxieties, the film was an instant midnight-madness cult item that took Byrne six years to follow up.
When he did, he went in a different tonal direction with “The Devil’s Candy,” a surprisingly emotional psychological thriller about a heavy-metal-loving painter who moves his family to a beautifully rustic home, only to lose his mind. Working in recognizable horror subgenres, Byrne entices you with a familiar premise and then slowly teases apart the tropes, leaving you unsettled but also invigorated by his inventiveness.
It has now been a decade since that distinctive riff on “The Shining,” and for Byrne’s third feature, he once again pillages from indelible sources. “Dangerous Animals” draws from both the serial-killer thriller and Hollywood’s penchant for survival stories about hungry sharks feasting on human flesh. But unlike in the past, Byrne’s new movie never waylays you with a surprise narrative wrinkle or unexpected thematic depth. He hasn’t lost his knack for generating bad vibes, but this time he hasn’t brought anything else to the party.
The movie stars Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, a solitary surfer who explains in on-the-nose dialogue that she prefers the danger of open water to the unhappiness of life on land. An American in Australia who grew up in foster homes and who lives in a beat-up old van, Zephyr encounters Moses (Josh Heuston), a straitlaced nice guy whom she hooks up with. Not that she wants him developing feelings for her: She takes off in the middle of the night so she can catch some waves. Unfortunately, Zephyr is the one who gets caught — by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a deceptively gregarious boat captain who kidnaps her. Next thing she knows, she’s chained up inside his vessel out at sea, alongside another female victim, Heather (Ella Newton).
Like many a movie serial killer, Tucker isn’t just interested in murdering his prey — he wants to make something artistic out of his butchery. And so he ties Heather to a crane and dangles her in the water like a giant lure, pulling out a camcorder to record her final moments as sharks devour her. Watching his victims struggle to stay alive is cinema to this twisted soul and Zephyr will be his next unwitting protagonist.
Working from a script by visual artist Nick Lepard, Byrne (who wrote his two previous features) digs into the story’s B-movie appeal. Tucker may use old-fashioned technology to record his kills, but “Dangerous Animals” is set in the present, even if its trashy, drive-in essence would have made it better suited to come out 50 years ago as counterprogramming to “Jaws.” With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.
But despite that juicy setup, “Dangerous Animals” is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped. There are still subversive ideas — for one thing, this is a shark film with precious few sharks — but Byrne’s sneaky smarts have largely abandoned him. Rather than transcending expectations, “Dangerous Animals” surrenders to them.
One can’t fault Harrison, whose Zephyr spends much of the movie in a battle of wills with her captor. Because “Dangerous Animals” limits the amount of sharks we see, digitally inserting footage of the deadly creatures into scenes, the story’s central tension comes from Zephyr trying to free herself or get help before Tucker prepares his next nautical snuff film. Harrison projects a ferocious determination that’s paired with an intense loathing for this condescending, demented misogynist. It’s bad enough that Tucker wants to murder her — beforehand, he wants to bore her with shark trivia, dully advocating for these misunderstood animals. It’s an underdeveloped joke: “Dangerous Animals” is a nightmare about meeting the mansplainer from hell.
Alas, Courtney’s conception of the film’s true dangerous animal is where the story truly runs aground. The actor’s handsome, vaguely blank countenance is meant to suggest a burly, hunky everyman — the sort of person you’d never suspect or look twice at, which makes Tucker well-positioned to leave a trail of corpses in his path. But neither Byrne nor Courtney entirely gets their arms around this conventionally unhinged horror villain. “Dangerous Animals” overly underlines its point that we shouldn’t be afraid of sharks — it’s the Tuckers who ought to keep us up at night — but Courtney never captures the unfathomable malice beneath the facial scruff. We root for Zephyr to escape Tucker’s clutches not because he’s evil but because he’s a bit of a stiff.
Even with those deficiencies, the film boasts a level of craft that keeps the story fleet, with Byrne relying on the dependable tension of a victim trapped at sea with her pursuer, sharks waiting in the waters surrounding her. Michael Yezerski’s winkingly emphatic score juices every scare as the gore keeps ratcheting up — particularly during a moment when Zephyr finds an unexpected way to break out of handcuffs.
But Byrne can’t redeem the script’s boneheaded plot twists, nor can he elevate the most potentially intriguing idea at its core. As Tucker peers into his viewfinder, getting off on his victims’ screams as sharks sink their jaws into them, “Dangerous Animals” hints at the fixation horror directors such as Byrne have for presenting us with unspeakable terrors, insisting we love the bloodshed as much as they do. Tucker tries to convince Zephyr that they’re not all that different — they’re both sharks, you see — but in truth, Byrne may be suggesting an uncomfortable kinship with his serial killer. But instead of provocatively pursuing that unholy bond, the director only finds chum.
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