The Reel Review
An American surfer living on Australia’s Gold Coast must fight for her life after she is abducted by a shark-obsessed serial killer who makes video recordings from his boat of his ritual feeding of live victims to the ocean predators. Hassie Harrison and Jai Courtney star in this horror/thriller.
Gruesome torture porn and some highly unlikely plot twists aside, Dangerous Animals is proof that a relatively low budget shark thriller doesn’t have to be terrible. Harrison (Yellowstone, Tacoma FD) is convincing as the resourceful, street-smart ingenue whose fortitude and grit far exceeds her seemingly easygoing appearance. Courtney (American Primeval, Terminator Genisys) is unsettlingly good as the serial killer with a macabre video library.
Director Sean Byrne (The Devil’s Candy) incorporates actual footage of great whites, makos, bull sharks, tiger sharks and nurse sharks, much in 4k resolution, alongside some fairly realistic looking above water CGI of shark fins, to give Dangerous Animals a sense of realism lacking in most CGI-heavy shark thrillers, and in the process, portraying man, and not the shark, as the true monster.
REEL FACTS
• Dallas native Hassie Harrison stars as Laramie on the Western drama series Yellowstone.
• Dangerous Animals screenwriter Nick Leperd wrote the screenplay for the upcoming horror film Keepers, directed by Osgood Perkins (The Monkey, Longlegs).
• Dangerous Animals director Sean Byrne was nominated for the Directors’ Fortnight Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
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