Jaws meets Wolf Creek in a watery Ozploitation movie that seems to ask what would happen if Steve Irwin were a demented serial killer with a camcorder and mommy issues.
The movie’s villain, Tucker, played with operatic derangement by Jai Courtney of Terminator Genisys and Suicide Squad, runs a gnarly Gold Coast shark-dive business that is not what it seems.
After luring unsuspecting tourists on to his boat, he sails into shark-infested waters, dangles his passengers overboard and films their deaths for his VHS snuff collection.
New to town, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is a nomadic lone-wolf American surfer chick with a militant resistance to emotional intimacy. When she hooks up with a sensitive Aussie named Moses (Josh Heuston), she stays in her van and disappears before breakfast. Unhappily, that’s when she gets nabbed by Tucker.
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Zephyr’s lock-picking girlboss survivalist isn’t always enough to counter the film’s fetishised female suffering or its subplot sending Moses to the rescue. For all the Oedipal signalling, Nick Lepard’s script can’t reconcile Tucker’s strangely desexualised sadism with his desire to decorate his torture-porn tapes with locks of hair from his victims.
The sharks – best when they are rotoscoped from nature footage – are demoted to junior partners in this crazy man’s gendered trauma. They, of course, are not the dangerous animals of the title.
A surprise inclusion at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight strand last month, Sean Byrne’s third feature is neither as gripping as The Loved Ones, his prom-night horror, nor as intriguing as The Devil’s Candy, his supernatural heavy-metal thriller, but it rattles along as effective B-movie gore. It even manages to include a rendition of Baby Shark without descending into the pointless camp of Sharknado.
Harrison is a game final girl, Courtney is an imposing villain, and their two-step is a masterclass in look-out-behind-you dramaturgy. See it with an audience for the biggest possible splash.
In cinemas from Friday, June 6th
