Peanut butter and chocolate. Serial killers and sharks. Set in Australia, “Dangerous Animals” (2025) is the latest entry in tourist horror as unsuspecting visitors go on an expedition to swim in a cage with sharks. Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs the solo expedition business and is the trusted, reassuring face of the ocean so no one expects him to be a psycho killer. When he picks his next target, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), he bites off more than he can chew. Which would a woman choose: the man or the shark?
Historically Courtney’s face has been viscerally enraging because he is not Michael Rosenbaum, and the disappointment is hard to get over. The good news is that as he gets older, he looks and sounds more like himself than a beloved American character actor. It was not on anyone’s bingo card that Courtney would deliver a performance as memorable as Ted Levine did in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) as Jame Gumb or Buffalo Bill. Controversial hot take, but Courtney’s dancing is way more spontaneous and unexpected than the far more attractive Tom Hiddleston offers in “The Life of Chuck” (2025). There is nothing better than when an actor finds a role that lets them loose, and hopefully Courtney is done taking parts that any actor can play and keeps uniquely exploring the furthest corners of his characters.
Tucker is a man who loves his job because it is not about getting money but recreating a childhood trauma and savoring the fear and shock of his victims to the point of death, which he never experienced. Apparently, the metaphor of murder as sexual satisfaction is not done to death and finds new vigor without crossing any tasteful lines. He is the mashup of real-life serial killer H. H. Holmes meets the cinematic psycho from “Peeping Tom” (1960). Tucker is an amateur director and showman who uses his boat and the ocean as his stage and set with a proclivity to create analog, found footage horror.
Australian director Sean Byrne is deft at visually treating the shark and by extension, the ocean, as a kind of Rorshark test for the beholder. To Brit Heather (Ella Newton), Tucker’s first onscreen target, the shark is an image of terror that she fears but briefly has a transcendent moment when she experiences the beauty and freedom of coexisting in the ocean with the apex predators. The slight adjustment to the score and the way that Byrne films the shark, with fewer cuts and further away transforms the tone into a nature documentary than a horror movie. By following this epiphany with terror, Tucker ruins her evolution and get what he wants: terrified shark food.
His next intended victim, Zephyr, is the ultimate final girl, and the ocean is her sanctuary. In online discourse, women answer the hypothetical question, “Bear or man,” with bear, but Zephyr takes it to the next level. Harrison is convincing as a woman who has innate confidence in her body’s physical strength and endurance that she would choose the shark-filled ocean at night even if she is bleeding. Harrison has a young Hayden Panettierre energy pre-the world deciding to prey on her. Zephyr is more like a lone wolf than any of the sea creatures that Tucker compares her to. Zephyr is a surfer and adventurer spawned from necessity after systems failed her. While the dialogue is eyeroll worthy and hippie derivative, Zephyr is all about defiance and freedom, so it is her nightmare to wake up chained to a bed, but she does not let anything slow her down. “Dangerous Animals” is Zephyr’s horror Groundhog Day where she must repeatedly perfect her means of escape, which happens to embed a lesson that she needs to learn: to stop running away from civilization and isolating herself.
“Dangerous Animals” is the latest in a growing line of movies that combine romance with other counterintuitive genres like horror or survival thrillers where a woman who is wary of relationships finds her Prince Charming and must save him, or they take turns saving each other. Filmmaker Christopher Landon has been singlehandedly dominating this field with “Heart Eyes” (2025) and “Drop” (2025), but now director Byrne and writer Nick Lepard are vying for Landon’s monopoly. Josh Heuston plays the role of Prince Charming, Moses Markley, a guy who dresses like a Mormon, but under the short sleeved white shirt and black tie, is a chiseled surfer who falls so hard for Zephyr that he notices that she is missing the instant that she leaves his side long before she is in danger. Brother has it bad and is kind of perfect: so good looking that his face is on a billboard, enjoys cooking and understanding of Zephyr’s wariness. He spends the movie looking for his Ms. Right, and a lot of the tension of Zephyr’s escape attempts are about timing. These measures are usually delayed so long that they coincide with when Tucker is ready to return his attention to his captives. If she had recognized the timing was right with Moses, she would not keep getting it wrong with Tucker.
Moses is also a keen observer and a terrific foil for Tucker. He does some sleuthing using local online resources to discover Zephyr’s whereabouts. It is the kind of scene that the average moviegoer would not notice, but it is the ingenious way that Lepard and Byrne elevate “Dangerous Animals” to more than the average horror movie. They are deliberately courting deeper analysis by depicting how we observe the world, what grabs our attention and who is the subject of that attention. There are two men hunting for a woman, but for different reasons. In many ways, Moses gets her in this predicament when he tosses her fin key (the key that unlocks her surfboard) in a playful moment together. It is somewhat unfortunate that Zephyr’s redemption arc is inextricably tied with finding the right man and punishing her for not immediately trusting him, going into his house and accepting him at face value, but he retroactively earns it. Don’t try this at home, ladies.
If “Dangerous Animals” has a flaw, it loses momentum after that opening. While watching it, it feels as if it will never end, but once you get to the end, you will look back and appreciate the pacing more. In a parallel universe, there is a tighter cut that could have accomplished the same result without trying the viewer’s patience and feeling as if it lost the plot. Just hang on, be forgiving. The payoff is worth it. While the dog lives, it does feel criminal that the dog never got its revenge against Tucker. That dog deserved a scene showing it getting vengeance or adopted.
“Dangerous Animals” feels like the unofficial sign that summer. started It is a horror thriller that borrows the terror spawned a half century ago with “Jaws” (1975), redeems the shark’s image and harnesses cinema’s fascination with demented, distinct serial killers. It also offers an all-time best performance for Courtney. It is far from perfect, but it should leave people satisfied when they are ready to go back to shore. Warning: finish your popcorn before one hour and fifteen minutes into the movie.
