Director Sean Byrne has been chumming the water for a long time. His new movie, Dangerous Animals, a shark infested survival thriller, is garnering great reviews and deservedly so.
It has a villain for the ages in Jai Courtney, who comes across as part man-child, part Buffalo Bill inspired psychopath, and it has Hassie Harrison as a heroine every bit his equal in the scene stealing department. But the truly dangerous thing about Byrne's film is the depths it swims in.
He never misses an opportunity for a thrill but he’s always deftly steering the narrative towards the characters' psychology and, dare I say, sense of the spiritual nature of what they are involved in. In short, this is more than a thrill ride that pays expert homage to everything from The Silence of the Lambs, to Jaws. It manages to make you care about the characters and dissects its villain with razor toothed accuracy.
Byrne should have been getting this recognition a long time ago. But the vagaries of the movie biz end up practically burying The Loved Ones (2009), a stomach twisting take on prom jitters. His next movie, the jaw-rattling occult thriller The Devil’s Candy (2015), suffered a similar fate despite widespread acclaim on the festival circuit and genre press. Dangerous Animals might just end that trend.