Director: Sean Byrne
Stars: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston
At the centre of Sean Byrne’s third feature as director there is a chair, and it’s not there by happenstance. It’s a specially designed chair. Time and consideration has been put into its construction and purpose. For burly serial killer Tucker (Jai Courtney) it is a throne in which he chains those he wants to bear witness. For Sean Byrne, it might as well be a cinema seat, and the Australian horror auteur places us and his entire audience both in it and on trial.
Byrne features come along once in a blue moon (it’s been a decade since his US offering The Devil’s Candy), but it’s worth taking notice when they do. From the outside, Dangerous Animals looks like it might be just another shark movie, the kind that gets spat out by some small studio or other roughly once a year. Trust Byrne to hide something far more conniving and insidious on the inside. As Tucker himself declares in one of his self-congratulatory diatribes, “It’s not the shark’s fault” that it’s a predator. Here the shark is a means to an end; the high-concept USP of Tucker’s particular brand of snuff cinema. The real monster, as Dangerous Animals wryly reveals, is the director.
We’re back in Byrne’s native Australia, and American nomad Zephyr (Hassie Harrison in what ought to be a career-maker) is cruising the coast in her van looking for surf spots. She’s a self-styled loner, both resourceful and wary, so when nice guy Moses (Josh Heuston) happens into her life and starts making puppy eyes, she’s inclined to flee the potential connection. People are dangerous, after all. But Zephyr can’t anticipate Tucker, skipper of his own brand of shark tours in which nobody gets to go home. He abducts Zephyr and handcuffs her aboard his boat, where another abductee Heather (Ella Newton) is about to star in his latest home video as she’s fed to the frenzied fish that so fascinate him.
Which leads us to the chair. Tucker plays with his captives, dangling them above the thrashing water and capturing the event on murky VHS, but that’s not enough. He psychologically traumatises future victims by having them witness their assured fate. And maybe, in sharing his ‘work’, he looks for someone else to appreciate it. To see him.
And so Byrne places us in the chair, makes us culpable in his acts of horror and gallingly casts himself as the psycho manipulator behind it all. The one to blame. Dangerous Animals is, in a real sense, a pretty daft idea. I mean, a serial killer who’s murder weapon is a shark? Sounds daft. But the way in which Byrne manages to put both himself and us under scrutiny here is blistering. There’s no acknowledgement of the goofiness. Dangerous Animals is bitterly sincere. And that’s the key to its riveting success.
Or, at least, one of the keys. As inferred already, Harrison is a major factor in this one working the way it does. As swift as Byrne’s films tend to be, he has a track record of taking the time to get us emotionally attached to his characters. Ethan Embry achieved this with earnestness in The Devil’s Candy. Here it’s Harrison whose work we readily appreciate, even as Courtney looms large in the picture as the darkly charismatic Tucker. Tucker sees her as a kindred spirit to him because, as he puts it, she’s “a fighter”. It’s not a comparison she takes kindly to, but Harrison’s performance keeps us compelled because of what’s not said. We’re left to infer that some past experience has wounded and prepared her for the distrustful, resourceful nature she’s accumulated. That this history isn’t given definition allows us to imprint as we see fit.
Tucker’s past is elaborated on, but it’s also called out as little more than flimsy justification for his acts of sadism. Late in the picture Tucker has an opportunity to toy with Moses, and he urges the nice guy to let his darkest, most monstrous desires reach the surface, furthering a philosophy that all men have an innate evil that society insists is supressed. Byrne’s cinema has toyed previously – nay, naggingly – with the idea of evil. Where it comes from and how it’s contained. Zephyr calls bullshit on trauma as an excuse for sadistic behaviour. An act of evasion. Tucker represents an adverse and much more dangerous type of loner; a sociopath who through separation has convinced himself he’s above the rules of society and therefore free to revel in his own twisted perversities.
Tucker’s boat comes to feel a little like the Sawyer house from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; a place where the heinous happens but also, disturbingly, the wildly unpredictable. An isolated hell just adrift from the shores of regulated society. An island of chaos. Aboard is Byrne’s dastardly hot seat, in which we’re all the filmmaker’s victim. Out in the dark, however, we’re more circumspect than Tucker’s prey. We’ve chosen to take that seat and look at the murk Byrne and screenwriter Nick Lepard have conjured up. Whether it shocks and appalls us is, at the end of the day, almost immaterial. Raising our hand for a ticket has damned us as much as whatever awaits us. It’s this that Byrne gets us thinking about once the lights go up on his third superior genre picture.
Popcorn, anyone?
The Lost Highway Hotel 