Sean Byrne’s gonzo horror thriller premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes film festival, in the sidebar where Cannes traditionally finds a place in its heart for genre or offbeat fare. Yet despite this stamp of authority – and a lead turn from Jai Courtney that could best be described as “gnarly” – I couldn’t get behind this movie, which has a bargain-basement straight-to-streaming feel to it.
The scene is the Australian Gold Coast where surfers come to catch gigantic waves. Hassie Harrison (from TV’s Yellowstone) plays a badass surfer named Zephyr, who travels around in her van as free as the wind sampling the most outrageous swells. She meets-cute with Moses (Josh Heuston), a nerdy guy who is very sweet and yet also kind of hot. When they part, Zephyr is to come fatefully into contact with the film’s horrible villain, a beefy, bullish guy called Tucker, played by Courtney, who has a business taking attractive twentysomething tourists wearing only swimming costumes out on his boat, promising them an intimate encounter with sharks. But the unspeakable Tucker, a great shark enthusiast himself, has some pretty unusual ideas about the food he wants to offer to bring these creatures up to his boat.
It would be pure pedantry to start quibbling about the fact that Tucker’s long-term interests would surely have attracted the attention of local police before now. And in the real world, stabbing a bad guy in the neck with an improvised knife will not generally cause him to just lie down as if asleep for 10 seconds, just long enough for you to get a head start with your final-girl escape-run away from him. This film has an audience, certainly, but it feels very derivative.
Dangerous Animals is in UK and Irish cinemas from 6 June and Australian cinemas from 12 June.