Sharks, a serial killer and Cannes glory. This Aussie film bites deep

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

There was pandemonium in the Theatre Croisette, home of the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight, before and after the screening of Australian film Dangerous Animals, announced as the first 'shark movie' ever to screen at the festival. Admittedly, the audience was stacked with mates – you could tell, because clustered cheers went up for the various production companies credited at the beginning – but there were also a lot of horror fans, including press colleagues who live for jump scares, gore and villains getting their comeuppance.
A journalist and critic from Poland, who is one of those horror buffs, told me she was sitting next to the woman who screamed loudly enough to fill the auditorium every time we saw a fin or fang. That just added to the joy, as far as she was concerned. Like everyone, she had clapped for a full nine minutes when the final credits rolled and Sean Byrne, the Tasmanian director, brought his cast up on stage.
Dangerous Animals delivers on a popular menu of genre expectations, starting with the maxim that Australia is full of creatures that can kill you. It is set on the Gold Coast, where ostentatiously Ocker skipper Bruce Tucker (Jai Courtney) takes tourists out to swim with sharks, protected inside a metal cage.
From the first minute, it's clear that Tucker is too much like a carbon copy of Steve Irwin to be true. Of course, he's a serial killer who preys on backpackers away on their own, ties them up and dangles them over the water in a harness of his own design and films them as they're torn to bits. Tucker himself was mauled by a Great White as a boy. Now he sees himself as a victorious apex predator.
His big mistake is picking on Hassie Harrison's Zephyr, a surfer who has purposefully drifted a long way from her American home. When she hooks up with Moses (Sydney actor Josh Heuston), something clicks between them – so that when she goes missing, there is someone local who is looking for her. She is also a fighter.
'It's so fun to play a character with that badass-ery and swagger,' says Harrison. 'It comes pretty close to home for me, growing up spending a lot of time in nature. I'd already been to Australia about 10 times. Being a Texan, I feel we're very kindred spirits.'
You can anticipate fatal turns in the plot, which is part of the pleasure; there is also fun to be had spotting those conventions and the sprinkling of quotes from other films. There are plenty of jokes and grisly bits of ick.
'Music to my ears,' says Byrne of that screamer in the audience. 'You work so hard on these moments, giving the audience permission to be scared, but also to have a good time.' It was always supposed to be fun.
Byrne's previous features, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were lower-budget US horrors. 'This was a big step-up in terms of budget and logistics, with underwater filming,' he says. 'I'm a massive fan of '80s action cinema like Die Hard and Speed. A lot of horror films are slow-burn or mood pieces, but mine tend to be fast-paced, so it's almost kind of action horror. Survival horror, in this case.' With some romance and comedy tropes, he adds; he likes the mix of genres.
Until this festival, I had no idea that 'shark films' constituted a sub-genre in themselves, with Steven Spielberg's Jaws as the daddy. 'There's no bigger cinematic shadow than Jaws,' Byrne agrees. 'But at the same time, what a great reference point! I kept coming back to Jaws and the power of the fin.
Shooting in the middle of the night, open sea, and there's a young person screaming for his or her life, it can creep through the armour.
Jai Courtney
The fin is almost the definition of suspense. If you see a fin above water, moving around, that is foreshadowing terror. Then, when the fin goes underwater, you are anticipating the attack, but the audience can't see what's happening. You've got them! I feel that has been lost a little bit in shark films recently, where you see dozens of sharks underwater, sometimes with their faces animated in an angry human way. I wanted something more like documentary reality.'
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Most importantly, the sharks in this movie are not the villains. Humans are cruel, possibly psychotic, sometimes just criminally negligent. Sharks are beautiful, stately princes of the sea, albeit princes with a lot of teeth. 'I've never seen that in a shark film, so that was an incredibly exciting opportunity,' enthuses Byrne.
Nick Lepard, who wrote the script, is married to a marine biologist; the film is full of facts about sharks, including the news that they don't actually like the taste of human flesh. 'I think it's such a breath of fresh air that the sharks are not the monster,' says Byrne. 'A man is the monster.'
Heuston says his impression, when he read the original script, was that Dangerous Animals would be more arthouse fare. 'When we started filming though, it became much more of a genre film.' He puts this largely down to Courtney, who brought an outsize dynamism and humour to the character of Tucker.
Harrison agrees. 'There's a levity he brings to the table. When I came on, they were talking about casting other people ... another actor would have taken it to a really dark place, whereas [Courtney's] performance is so funny I was often laughing on the other side of the camera.'
Courtney found it quite dark enough. 'Some of the acts Tucker commits, some of the way he does things, we have young actors hanging on a hook over the open water and when you're ... shooting in the middle of the night, open sea out on a boat, and there's a young person screaming for his or her life, it can occasionally creep through the armour of separating that from reality. And there were definitely moments in this film when I was saying right, can we get this done?'
Filming on water is difficult enough. Cameras rock along with the boat, actors and crew get seasick, the space is confined. Byrne didn't want to film in a tank, however. For a start, he says, the tank cost a prohibitive $80,000 a day. Secondly, he says tanks feel sterile. They're just big bathtubs, after all.
'Whereas filming at sea is really hard but exciting as well. It's really hard to replicate Mother Nature, with wind and salt and water hitting you in the face. Also, when we put the actors up on the crane and swung them out over the water, doing it for real gave it an immediacy and a primal quality we would never have got in a tank. But it was difficult. I think I'm one and done as far as shooting a film on water goes.'
He never imagined, he says, that they would end up in Cannes. It is true that a diverse bunch of successes, ranging from Wolf Creek to The Babadook to Talk to Me, have put Australian horror on the international map. 'We've got some great genre filmmakers,' says Byrne. 'And I think Australia is getting a reputation internationally for being attacking.'
He had thought they would do well in the market. 'That combination of shark film and serial killer film, I sensed that would sell well. This is a risk-averse industry, but you are ticking two very popular boxes.' He had a handle on its demographic.
'But I didn't expect it to end up in the festival,' he says. 'Because when you think of Cannes, you just don't think of shark films.'