In the Flesh: Dangerous Animals

If you’ve heard one serial killer give a growling monologue about the food chain and apex predators to their victims, you’ve heard them all. It’s too bad no one told Sean Byrne before he directed Dangerous Animals, a movie so transparently cobbled together from a dozen better scripts in the same ballpark that when it does manage to give us something worth looking at for a moment here and there it feels like a genuine surprise. In a movie about a shark-obsessed murderer feeding people to the objects of his grisly fascination, it’s not a great sign if the two most compelling things on offer are brief instants of eye contact or the killer, Tucker (Jai Courtney), looking with a confused tangle of predatory hunger and wounded need at a woman we can infer reminds him of his neglectful mother. There’s an early shot of a grinning Tucker lowering the gate to a shark cage on two clueless tourists which promises a sense of sleazy, nasty visual adventurousness that never quite subsequently materializes, though the film is competently shot and boasts gorgeously saturated colors.

The dialogue is forgettable at best, trying for Wolf Creek’s hard-edged local yokel unease and landing nowhere in particular instead. Going alone versus being with others, we’re not so different you and I, there’s nothing here you haven’t heard done better a hundred times before. Byrne’s own The Loved Ones, extremely structurally similar to Dangerous Animals, outsmarts and out-weirds it at virtually every turn. Hassie Harrison does good work as protagonist Zephyr, but her lack of a background makes her a slippery character for an audience to hold onto. We know she likes to surf. We know she likes to be on her own. That’s about it. A little color might have gone a long way toward sharpening her screen presence, which doesn’t compare to Ella Newton’s awkward, anxious giggling during her introduction or her gutting flat affect once she gives up on trying to escape their captor.

But if there’s one area where Dangerous Animals truly falls short, it’s the main attraction. There are a few instances of shark animatronics onscreen which manage to capture a little frisson of the atavistic terror Tucker drawls about at length, our brain’s built-in reaction to an animal the shadow of which looms over our genetic memory, but more often the scenes of Tucker’s murders feel inert and arbitrary. Sharks come or they don’t. They bite or they don’t. There’s no aesthetic to it, and the film fails to put us in the place of its victims, to let us experience their panic up close so that it bleeds into us and becomes a vicarious sensation. Instead we mostly watch from the deck as people thrash around in the water. Nor are we particularly pushed into the spectator’s feelings of helpless desperation. It’s a weak treatment of what should be cinematic dynamite, and by the time we get to the half dozen fakeouts and reversals which approximate our ending, all the tension is long since gone.