Dangerous Animals (2025) Review

"Ooby dooby."

This Dangerous Animals review is spoiler-free.

I’ve written on Talking Terror before about how nice it is to watch films set in locations you’re familiar with – with Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), set in Wellington (where I grew up) the most notable example for me – and, while I haven’t spent a huge amount in the Gold Coast, Australia, that iconic coastline does remind me why I love living Down Under.

It's sunny. It's relaxed. There's so much space, with so many beautiful beaches (and people). And, of course, I love it because Australia has always been a fertile ground for horror films.

There’s the isolation – both from the outside world, and from other towns, many of which are separated by hundreds of kilometres – and the desolation, with whole swathes of the country’s desert interior uninhabited.

Then, of course, there’s the animals. The dangerous ones.

Spiders, stingrays, snakes, stonefish, saltwater crocodiles, cassowaries; jellyfish, kangaroos, stingers (tiny, translucent sea-dwelling blobs that float around aimlessly, and are capable of causing cardiac arrest within moments of brushing up against you) – the list goes on.

Aussie filmmakers have a rich tradition of rounding up their own nation’s animals for horror fare – especially when it involves pitting them against unwitting expats from Europe or the US. Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback (1984) pitted an American couple against a giant, rampaging Outback boar. Greg McLeans’ Rogue (2007) set a giant crocodile on a boat full of unsuspecting foreign tourists in the Northern Territory, while Nick Robertson’s The Pack (2015) unleashes its titular posse of wild pooches on a local family.

Yet underneath it all, there’s always a separate beat – the pulse of another, ever more insidious and extremely more dangerous vein – that Aussie horror filmmakers have tapped to even greater effect It’s one that reminds us that, of all the things out to kill us in nature, there’s one threat that trumps all, and it’s not the animals – it’s other people. It's us.

Wolf Creek (2005) drew on the case of real-life Outback murderers Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch to give us John Jarratt’’s Mick Taylor – a psychotic recluse who kills backpackers for entertainment. Hounds of Love (2017) told the harrowing story of child kidnappers David and Catherine Birnie, while Snowtown (2011) retold the chilling true story behind the infamous “Bodies in the Barrels” murders. Dangerous Animals (2025) gives us Tucker.

For his 2025 film Dangerous Animals, Sean Byrne harnesses a terror that’s both human and animalistic – squaring wild-child American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) off against deranged, shark-obsessed killer Tucker (Jai Courtney) – whose outward Antipodean jocularity belies a cold, predatory, and murderous interior.

The supporting cast includes Zephyr’s love interest Moses (Josh Heuston) and Heather (Ella Newton): an English girl also caught up in Tucker’s plans.

Imagine this being the last thing you see before you get gobbled up by sharks.

Dangerous Animals’ premise is simple; its story is tight. Tucker abducts Zephyr – fresh off the back of meeting Moses, who she sleeps with but, owing to a troubled past, struggles to open up to emotionally – as she prepares to surf. He takes her to his boat – where Zephyr meets Heather, a traveller kidnapped by Tucker just days prior – where his murderous modus operandi is revealed: Tucker is a serial killer who uses sharks to do his dirty work.

Jai Courtney plays Tucker with an unhinged charisma that, while dancing close to the line of ‘hamming it up’, never crosses it. He’s all Type A Aussie bravado, skin weathered and leathery from long, SPF-less days under the sun; you can practically smell the salt of the sea exuding off him through the screen.

Courtney’s Tucker speaks almost exclusively in a series of Deadliest Catch-esque monologues: pontificating about the habits of nautical apex predators and espousing the merits of marlin in game fishing. Yet as mentioned, Courtney only flirts with full-on scenery-chewing mode – content to let his character’s charges do the chomping for him.

Zephyr was also a good character (you certainly root for her the whole way through) and – despite some of the more romantic moments the film supplies feeling a little trite and shoehorned in – there’s an immediacy to Harrison’s performance that grounds the film, preventing it from drifting too far into schlocky waters.

Harrison's Zephyr isn’t painted as a one-note “final girl”; she’s messy, impulsive, and already scarred by her past. When she’s fighting for survival against both Tucker and his sharks, the film plays less like a straight creature feature and more like a darkly ironic redemption arc. Harrison wrings every ounce of physicality out of the role – her body language shifting believably from carefree tourist to panicked captive to something resembling steely resolve.

Hassie Harrison as Zephyr.

As for the sharks themselves, Byrne (wisely) avoids overexposure. This isn’t Jaws, with a single leviathan lurking beneath the waves, nor is it The Meg, revelling in outsized spectacle. Dangerous Animals opts for something queasier – a kind of banal horror in the way the sharks are deployed. They aren’t cinematic monsters, they’re tools – extensions of Tucker’s twisted pathology, rather than beings acting out of any evil agency of their own.

Byrne keeps their appearances sudden, fragmented, and raw, ensuring they hit harder when they do arrive. When it comes, the gore is sharp and short – more punch than indulgence.

A dangerous animal, indeed!

What really sells the film, though, is Byrne’s eye. His debut, The Loved Ones (2009), had a neon-drenched sadism that made prom night feel like a fever dream. Dangerous Animals is cut from a similar cloth, though its palette is different: sun-bleached and ocean-worn.

The camera lingers on the glittering coastline, the lure of endless surf, then pivots brutally into claustrophobic shots below deck, where the boat’s hull becomes another kind of trap. The effect is to remind you constantly of freedom just out of reach – an expanse of open sea that’s, paradoxically, more imprisoning than liberating.

A look at Josh Heuston as Moses in Dangerous Animals (2025).

If there’s a criticism, it’s that the script keeps its themes a little too close to the surface. Tucker’s fixation on sharks as avatars of dominance and natural order is spelled out in that series of aforementioned repeated monologues, which occasionally dull their bite – and there are times you wish Byrne trusted the imagery more and the dialogue less.

Yet there’s still a strange pleasure in watching Courtney chew through those fishy sermons: a barnacled prophet preaching to captives who couldn’t care less.

Jai Courtney delivers a wonderfully deranged performance as Tucker, Dangerous Animals' big bad.

By the film’s final act, Dangerous Animals locks into a lean, ruthless rhythm. The climax is as inevitable as the tide – and Byrne makes sure it crashes down with both horror and catharsis. It’s nasty, it’s bloody, and it leaves just enough of a salty tang in your mouth to linger long after all the credits – and the barrels – have rolled.

It's been a good year for Australian horror! 2025 has brought us gems like Bring Her Back, Together, and Zak Hilditch's We Bury the Dead. So stick around to read more about them – and about the best horror films of 2025 – right here on Talking Terror.