It’s been 50 years since Jaws simultaneously invented and perfected the concept of the modern summer blockbuster. No less than King Kong or the monolith in 2001, the marauding (and famously malfunctioning) great white known colloquially as Bruce casts a long silhouette on both movie history and popular culture at large. The success of Steven Spielberg’s classic has ensured that, to paraphrase Tracy Jordan, every week is Shark Week. Cleverly adapted from Peter Benchley’s bestseller about a tourist community under attack by a rogue carnivore—the ultimate self-reflexive beach read—Jaws fused primal B-movie fears with the mature textures and techniques of the New Hollywood; its eventual presence in a then-record 700 theaters effectively created a new template for theatrical release patterns that prized opening weekend revenue over word of mouth and revolutionized mass-media marketing.
These developments spawned a veritable infestation of sleek, easily sequelized, high-concept studio productions—and acts of resistance like Joe Dante’s Piranha, which allegorized low-budget subversion by swapping out one big mechanical shark for a feeding frenzy of miniature killers. They also led to a seismic shift in public fascination with and fear of sharks, the so-called Jaws effect. In the years following the film’s release, the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America declined by about 50 percent, a confluence of increasingly mechanized industrial fishing practices, emboldened poachers, and bloodthirsty weekend warriors trying to get in touch with their inner Quints. “I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film,” Spielberg has said.
“I couldn’t write Jaws today,” noted Benchley in 1995. “The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”
The new Australian film Dangerous Animals flips that idea of villainy on its head. Sean Byrne’s malevolent little thriller, which played to rave reviews last month at Cannes before opening in the U.S. this week, may not be the best shark movie of the 21st century: All hail Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows, which is basically an extended life-and-death game of Frogger between Blake Lively and a very determined great white, with a seagull named Steven Seagull thrown in for good measure. But Dangerous Animals is almost certainly the darkest and the most thoughtful shark movie of this century, and the one that takes Jaws’ legacy to the deepest and most fucked-up places. Where Jaws cemented the seductive (but fraudulent) archetype of the shark as a kind of aquatic serial killer, Dangerous Animals deals with a sociopath who weaponizes the local shark population for his own fetishistic ends. The first hint that the paunchy, disheveled tour bout mogul Captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) is secretly an apex predator comes with the revelation of his first name: It’s Bruce.
“I Beat Jaws!” reads a vintage newspaper headline framed on the wall of Captain Tucker’s dilapidated boat. As a young surfer on the Gold Coast, the Captain had a close encounter with a shark that briefly made him a media darling—and left him with a set of deep scars. The physical ones have become useful as a proof of his authenticity and a conversation piece for his shark tour business, “Tucker’s Experience” (the same way they were for Robert Shaw’s shark hunter in Jaws). The psychological ones, meanwhile, remain uncauterized, having left their wearer obsessively chasing the high of skin-rending violence. Captain Tucker may pay the bills by buttering up sunburned tourists, but what he really wants to be is a director. The cabinet of VHS cassettes hung up belowdecks testifies to his ambitions: Each one is labeled for a different young woman being eaten alive—hapless free-range starlets handpicked and served up by a would-be snuff-cinema Spielberg whose preferred production method is to chum the water, get behind the lens of his consumer-grade video camera, and call action.
Lined up all in a row, Captain Tucker’s home movies are a wonderful parody of gore-hound fastidiousness: Imagine Bluebeard as the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. There have been plenty of other movies analyzing the potentially murderous subtext of scopophilia, of course; as a movie about a sexually frustrated voyeur hiding behind the camera that he wields as a weapon, Dangerous Animals is as indebted to Michael Powell’s skin-crawling 1960 masterpiece, Peeping Tom, as it is to Jaws. Fortunately, Dangerous Animals keeps the pretentiousness dialed down; the ideas emerge more or less naturally through the action. Courtney, a lapsed action star who previously swaggered his way through Suicide Squad and Terminator: Genisys, has done his part to make Captain Tucker scary and funny, playing him as a bulky, shaggy, beer-swilling bastard. (It’s like he’s auditioning to play “Big Nick” O’Brien in an Aussie community theater production of Den of Thieves.) There are plenty of obvious precedents—from Shaw in Jaws to Billy Zane in Dead Calm, still the gold standard for Australian genre exercises—but Courtney is still unsettling. He makes sure that Captain Tucker’s eyes are even bigger than his belly; picking at his dinner beneath the sounds of previously recorded screams emanating from his analog-era televisions set, he’s a bottomless pit.
Hooked on Shark Movies? We’ve Got You Covered
In scenes like that, it’s clear that Byrne is poking fun at claims that horror cinema desensitizes its consumers to violence, and like any smart movie on the subject (see also: last year’s creepy Canadian standout Red Rooms), Dangerous Animals is judicious when it comes to dishing out gore. Compared to Byrne’s 2009 breakthrough, The Loved Ones—a truly hellacious twist on prom movie tropes whose hero gets bleach injected in his vocal cords—Dangerous Animals feels restrained, even with its disturbing central set piece. By the midway point of the film, Captain Tucker has acquired two tasty pieces of bait: Heather (Ella Newton), a hapless backpacker captured during the prologue (after her dumbass male companion gets stabbed in the throat and tossed overboard), and Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a plucky surfer who serves as the film’s heroine and final-girl-in-waiting. By forcing the latter to watch as her fellow captive is trussed up in a chair connected to a winch and lowered into the water, Tucker turns her into a two-way mirror, reflecting both his and the audience’s complicit voyeurism and the victim’s terror as she’s torn to pieces.
If it’s generally true that any horror movie is only as good as its monster, Dangerous Animals does surprisingly well by its heroine. Zephyr may be a bit of a cliché—a rootless adrenaline junkie hanging 10 on her own sense of independence and adventure—but she knows it; after hooking up with the cute realtor (Josh Heuston) to whom she’d previously lent jumper cables, she explains that she’s basically modeled her life on Patrick Swayze’s speech from Point Break. “We stand for something to those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins,” she smiles, doing her best Bodhi. “We show them that the human spirit is still alive.”
It’s a fine line between life philosophy and meme fodder, and generally, movies that deal—even ironically—with the triumph of the human spirit are just so much multiplex chum. But Dangerous Animals is the rare survival thriller in which it feels like something is at stake beyond the mechanics of the story line. Zephyr’s repeated attempts to escape “Tucker’s Experience” are about resisting figurative consumption as much as the real thing. She’s not ready for her close-up and fights back tooth and nail in ways that become surprisingly rousing, including by threatening Tucker with the ultimate castration: messing with his audiovisual equipment.
Byrne is a good director. He has lots of sick, giddy fun with locations, props, and gimmicks, including an underwire bra, a Vegemite sandwich, and the intermittent sightings of a party cruise whose EDM-entranced revelers are comically indifferent to the suffering aboard Tucker’s boat. More importantly, amid the predictable plot beats, he nails the one sequence that really matters—a late passage in which Dangerous Animals plays with Jaws and its iconography in what feels like a new way. At the moment of truth, Byrne gives us a great white who’s not a mindless eating machine or a diabolical Moby Dick manqué but an almost cosmic figure of weightless, abstract awe. This flirtation with lyricism doesn’t mean that Dangerous Animals wimps out on its title. Rather, it deepens it. And then, as a reward for indulging this poetic side, Byrne obligingly doles out the gore that we came for.
