Near the beginning of Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, Surfers Paradise local Moses (Josh Heuston) asks American free spirit Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) if she likes the aisle or the window seat. It is is his way of getting to know her which immediately teases out the obvious differences between them: he is an aisle person, open and sociable, while she is very much the window type, private and aloof. Still, his gambit pays off, for they are soon sleeping together in the back of her van, parked outside his house that she is not yet willing to enter – and in spite of her vaunted independence, she likes Moses, and is thinking of seeing him again.
Unfortunately, though, Zephyr is about to fall into the clutches of Tucker (Jai Courtney). A much more solitary creature even than herself, Tucker takes tourists out on his boat for shark dives, but he is also a serial killer who gets off on filming his clients, especially the women, being torn apart in the predators’ jaws.
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Like the sharks here that spectacularly swim around these chum-filled waters before moving in for the kill, Byrne has come full circle. For his career started in his native Australia with the prom pandemonium of 2009’s The Loved Ones, then moved stateside for the Texas-set saga of art, evil and errant masculinity in 2015’s The Devil’s Candy. Now, he returns to Australia’s Gold Coast. Yet the one constant in his films is horror of a psychologically twisted variety, where predators and prey share the same terrain and where survival of the fittest often requires a reversal of roles.
Dangerous Animals might sound like just another of the countless, typically direct-to-video shark movies that have come in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), but in fact this is more like a merger of Irving Pichel and Ernest B Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005). For here in fact the title refers to the human players, with the sharks just there as objective correlatives for the characters’ unfolding psychodrama.
So why sharks? The simple answer is that they are cinematic, as Tucker knows full well. He is after all filming these deaths so that he can savour all the gory details later while eating his own meal – and he regularly talks about his murders as a “show”, declares, “Brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen” when the ritual has to be paused, and even likes to force one prisoner to watch the other’s agonising dismemberment. There is a strong metacinematic element to all this showmanship, and as Zephyr must work out just how much like Tucker she is capable of being, we too are confronted with the nature of our own spectatorship, uncomfortably similar to Tucker’s, for in our window seat on events, we are no captive audience.
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