Review: ‘Dangerous Animals' sets new standard for survival thrillers

San Francisco Chronicle​

4 days ago

As suspense thrillers go, 'Dangerous Animals' is as uncompromising as it gets. It doesn't aspire to much, but it's well-acted and well-written, looks great and full of surprises.
Over and over, and in the best way, it's pure torture to watch. I screened it at home and, at one point, I had to force myself not to run out of the room. But even if, at times, you feel tempted to flee 'Dangerous Animals' like I did, you may find yourself invested enough to stick with it.
A curtain raiser introduces us to the villain, Bruce (Jai Courtney), a burly bearded fellow who appears to be genial — if you don't look into his cold, skewed eyes. He's a maniac with a very particular sexual fetish involving feeding people to sharks, particularly women. In a pinch, he'll settle for a guy, but women are his favorite.
Next, we meet Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, an American surfer, temporarily living in Australia so she can experience the waves there. She is rootless and unconnected, a free spirit, which makes her interesting but also vulnerable. She's the kind of woman that serial killers have been going after since the Jack the Ripper days, because she could disappear without anyone knowing it.
'Dangerous Animals' is often terrifying. The vast bulk of it consists of Zephyr being held prisoner on a psychopath's boat, trying to figure out how to outsmart and overpower an experienced murderer who is twice her weight.
Some viewers will already be familiar with Harrison from her role as Laramie on the hit Western drama 'Yellowstone,' but 'Dangerous Animals' marked the first time I'd seen her, and I was impressed.
The essential quality that Harrison has to convey here is a powerful survival instinct. She has to make you accept that Zephyr is willing to go to almost unimaginable extremes, and Harrison succeeds in doing that. She plays a woman whose commitment to survival is beyond jaw-dropping, and yet Harrison keeps her choices grounded and human.
There's a scene late in the film, in which Harrison does the coolest and most extreme thing I've seen in a thriller since Bruce Willis shot himself through his own shoulder in order to kill the guy standing behind him in ' Live Free or Die Hard ' (2007). For 18 years, that was the ultimate benchmark of action-hero intensity, but now Harrison has him beat.
The script by Nick Lepard is first-rate, if you keep in mind the kind of script a movie like this needs. It's not about witty repartee. The deft Lepard must devise a series of surprising, escalating, maddeningly frustrating, shockingly outlandish and yet strangely believable incidents. This is a variety of good writing that gets no respect, except the respect that's implicit in a rapt audience.
Director Sean Byrne and cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe give 'Dangerous Animals' a welcome and unexpected look that's pretty. The ocean is crystalline, and the sky is bright and blue with puffy white clouds. Even the death boat is attractive with its red, yellow and blue against a blue sea.
We get the idea. Rather than taking place in a world where evil occurrences seem inevitable, 'Dangerous Animals' takes place in a world where evil isn't expected — thus making it easier for lunatics like Bruce to operate under the radar. In that way, the filmmakers keep reminding us of the agonizing fact that, aside from all the horror Zephyr is experiencing, it's otherwise a very lovely day.