The trailer tells you everything you need to know about the Sean Byrne directed, Hassie Henderson and Jai Courtney starring film. It’s a Gold Coast set ninety minute thriller about a serial killer who kills people with sharks. While you watch it you’ll be entertained enough, you’ll notice that DP, Shelley Farthing-Dawe, does a stand-out job, Jai Courtney is having lots of fun and that it doesn’t have the narrative spine for a full 90 minutes but it gets there nonetheless. If that’s all you’re looking for in an evening then watch Dangerous Animals.

 

My complaints come with what’s going on under the surface. Thematically it reaches for lots of things. You could take away how Hunter (Jai Courtney) spends his life inflicting the shark related trauma he experienced as a child on women. Or how Zephyr (Hassie Henderson) has to stop running from her foster home/juvie past and eventually face them in order to succeed. This may sound like an odd thing to rub up against but I found it occupying a strange middle ground between serious “elevated” horror and complete schlock. It puts too much effort into messaging for it to go complete Psycho III but is equally too stupid and silly to be The Babadook. It leaves a strange lingering taste in the viewer’s mouth. 

 

That’s probably not off putting to most moviegoers who just want entertainment, but as I dig into what is actually being said by the film and not what Byrne and screenwriter, Nick Lepard, intended to say I find there’s something regressive in the film’s themes. Like how inadvertently Halloween through its virginal final girl can be seen as a lesson on the virtue of abstinence, Dangerous Animals can be seen as a send-up of “nice-guys.”

 

If Josh Heuston’s Moses Markley were a real person I could guarantee there’d be multiple posts on r/niceguys about him. His entire personality is that actually despite blackmailing Zephyr for shoplifting he’s a really sweet guy who thinks deeply about the subtext of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs and even makes breakfast for Zephyr the morning after. At one point Moses, as only a nice guy could, notices that Zephyr is not okay and is actually running away from something back home in America. Written on paper that sounds genuine but he has this incessant demand that she is in love with him as he is for her. He keeps going on about how “you can feel it too, Zephyr,” even though the film itself calls out that he’s known her for 10 hours. This expectation of love and sex for being nice is the exact prototype of a “nice guy” and yet the film, if anything, glorifies this character.

 

On the opposite spectrum, Hunter exemplifies an abusive boyfriend. He lures women in with his charisma then, once he’s trapped them (in his boat instead of a relationship), he reveals his true intention of inflicting his own trauma (he shows the opening couple of victims his huge shark attack scar) onto someone else to make himself feel better. 

 

With this reading it makes sense as to why the film would be more on Moses’ side. Of course the nice guy is better than the physical abuser. However the plotting makes this all feel icky. Zephyr is abducted by Hunter as a direct cause of her surreptitiously leaving Moses after their hook-up which gives the sense that her torture (metaphorical relationship with an abusive boyfriend) is punishment for not falling immediately in love with the nice guy.

 

Really Zephyr doesn’t have any agency in the film. She makes escape attempts and physically fights a lot but is positioned in the screenplay as stuck between these two men and ultimately only succeeds once she realises her “love” for Moses. There is never the option for her to be free and single. We see her at the start as an independent woman choosing to surf across the globe but the script positions this as a cowardly attempt at running from her problems. Sure, that could be true but the film isn’t about overcoming her past. We have no idea what her past is, all we get is brief conversations that’s main functions are to explain why she can pick a lock and overcome the next obstacle. The film ends up being about how she just needed to accept the love of the right man.

 

It's a weirdly regressive subtext for our modern era and can probably be chalked up to the male director and screenwriter’s blindness to their own projections. But hey, if anything it makes the film more unique. I was distracted by it but I don’t think the film wants anyone to think that hard about what’s going on. I’d prefer if it was more stupid, but it’s still an enjoyable thriller.