Dangerous Animals – Review

Release Date – 6th June 2025, Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 38 minutes, Director – Sean Byrne

Surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) wakes up trapped on a boat in the middle of the sea, having to fight for survival against a serial killer (Jai Courtney) who throws his victims to the sharks.

Dangerous Animals appears to jump straight into its main conceit as we see young acquaintances Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton) embark on a shark cage diving experience. Captain Tucker (Jai Courtenay) sets an unsteady tone from his first greeting, but the experience seems to go well until he brings them up, stabs Greg in the neck and pushes him into the water for the sharks. Whilst Heather screams the title card appears and we cut to our actual protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). This is one of multiple deceptive set-ups for Dangerous Animals, however unlike this cold open the rest go almost nowhere.

Instead, after Zephyr is kidnapped by Tucker when planning to surf early one morning, and trapped on his boat in the middle of the sea – handcuffed to a bed in the same almost soundproof room as Heather – every time a new device or idea is introduced it’s simply looped back to more of the same of what we’ve seen before. A cycle forms of Tucker delivering increasingly tenuous monologues about sharks that loosely relate to the current situation, creating a threat for the characters, maybe with some bloodshed, before a last minute attempt at escape or fight for survival happens.

As the cycles repeated over and over again I found myself thinking, during the better moments where something new appeared to be happening before looping back once again, that the film would perhaps work better as a 30-minute short rather than an over 90-minute feature. Especially with how much the opening stages drag in introducing us to Zephyr and hook-up Moses (Josh Heuston), including completely unnecessary sex scene; there’s little that seems to come from this in terms of big developments for quite some time – and even then it simply comes back round to what we’ve already seen before.

There are some likable moments which provide some amusement amongst the poorly-blended shark sequences, but even these instances where Harrison plots or attempts her escape from Courtenay’s killer, although in actuality he gets little to do in comparison with how the film is trying to position him, begin to fall into overfamiliarity. What’s there that works certainly isn’t enough to lift the film as a whole, and simply points out the clear flaws which are present in the rest of the narrative structure. Making for a rather boring set of repetitive events which lack the bite wanted, and needed.

Feeling better suited to a short film rather than a feature, every time Dangerous Animals presents something new it uses it as a way to loop back to the start of the same cycle in a consistently lacking state of repetition.