Much has been made about the terror of the deep blue sea and its inhabitants, and the shark movie in particular is a genre unto itself, bursting onto shore with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and chomping its way through cineplexes ever since. Most of these films, whether knowingly goofy or solemnly straight-faced, had in their sights the unknowability of the elemental depths as it sought to undermine the certainty of lucid human rationality. But as much as the title of one of their latest entries spells out this threat in no uncertain terms, the metaphor behind it proves murkier. Dangerous Animals, the third feature by Australian filmmaker Sean Byrne, uproots the survival template from its elements and grafts it onto the skin of evil, but not before flaying it to reveal, at its heart, the sheer unreason of malice at odds with its calm and methodical practice.
Set on the Gold Coast, Dangerous Animals departs tonally from Byrne’s previous work: where The Loved Ones (2009) wrought a countryside love story out of prom-night delusion and ultraviolence, and The Devil’s Candy (2015) flirted with demonic possession and the twangs of psychopathy, the director’s latest broadcasts its unhinged assets out in the open summer ocean, a terrain familiar to disaster aficionados and few else. Tucker (Jai Courtney), a boat captain running a shark cage tourist attraction, stalks the seas; though his day job involves submerging thrill-seekers — protected by thick ribcages of steel — into shark-infested waters, his nocturnal ventures replace the thrills with kills as he plunges unsuspecting women, sans protection, to their gruesome deaths while he tapes their final moments using a camcorder. Cleverly, Byrne finds the optimal middle ground for the serial killer, pathologizing him cursorily with edgy Hobbesian rhetoric and more impressively with a madcap performance that thwarts clinical interpretations. Is this really the epitome of mankind, the most dangerous animal of them all?
The pleasures of Dangerous Animals are best enjoyed not through such speculation, but rather through its stylistic furnishings. Conscious of its insurmountable legacy and the endless potential for parody inherent within, the film delivers a sharp and brutally entertaining narrative without falling prey to seriousness. As Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a surfer nomad who travels around in a camper van, is abducted by Tucker to satiate his grotesque urges, she deploys her keen instincts to outwit her captor, only to engage in an ongoing, ever-bloodier game of cat and mouse. Her prim and proper one-night-stand, Moses (Josh Heuston), suspects her disappearance and investigates, but the open waters around Tucker’s boat do not readily admit nosy outsiders — not, at least, without a price. Much of the film’s action happens offshore in the tense and claustrophobic quarters where serial killer and would-be victim alike pace: one in thumb-sucking anticipation, the other in the hope of grasping the faintest sliver of survival.
Admittedly, this set-up does not prove especially novel — not even the mash-up of shark and serial killer in a showdown of man versus killing machine. Yet the intensity with which Byrne dials up the show provides ironic commentary on the vehicle of cinema itself as a voyeuristic medium of suffering. If the skin-deep connotation of his titular creature wasn’t apparent enough, it might be because the real subject at hand isn’t the shark, or the man who feeds it, but the lust for blood that sustains he who feeds and watches it. And given how much the film hums with the warbles of Ozploitation, this is no mere conjecture. Set to a propulsive score by Michael Yezerski, its screenplay, courtesy of Nick Lepard, slickly dispenses with the cheap thrills we’ve come to expect without saturating the mix. In examining the death drive and its fetishistic obsessions, Dangerous Animals should, in theory, be a nauseating experience. That it should exploit these obsessions and make us gleefully willing subjects of them reveals not shoddy writing, but a deft and knowing hand. The bait is out, and it is fresh.
DIRECTOR: Sean Byrne; CAST: Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films/Shudder; IN THEATERS: June 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
Comments are closed.