Just when you thought it was safe to go back into
the water... Wait, I NEVER thought it was safe?
dir: Sean Byrne
2025
There really must have been something in the water earlier this year or last year, because there are no shortage of shark films at the moment. I mean, there have been shark films bubbling around in the background, but I have to attribute the current upsurge to the 50th anniversary of the release of the first summer blockbuster Jaws.
Its success paved the way for Spielbergo to make plenty of other non-shark related films, and for the rest of us to be scared of being in open water on the ocean, which is a very sensible fear. But it also means there’s no shortage of lesser films banking on our inherent fear of these terrifying creatures.
I say that knowing full well that each year literally more people are killed by falling coconuts, cows and horses than are ever killed by the gentle sharks that have been so poorly maligned and slandered since Spielbergo catapulted his career into the stratosphere from upon their scaly backs. Very unfair, if you ask me, but no-one did, so I guess I should talk about this nasty film instead.
It has, at least from my perspective, been a long time between drinks from this horror auteur, Australia’s Own Sean Byrne. Anyone who saw The Loved Ones way back in the day knows what sheer brutal nastiness this director is capable of.
This flick is nowhere near that solid, but I enjoyed it a bit more than his second flick, being The Devil’s Candy, which lacked the sharpness of his debut (and felt poorly Americanised, which I won’t go into).
This flick, though, feels like a bit of an amalgam of storytelling tropes, horror tropes, sequences almost taking the piss out of the kinds of notes that executives at a studio would send to a director during a production demanding that they awkwardly insert what they think will make the movie more popular with audiences on a mass market level. So many of those elements are elaborated upon so brazenly that I felt like I was watching an Australianified updated version of Adaptation.
I could almost feel like I was listening to the Kaufman twins arguing about clichés in screenwriting and Brian Cox as screenwriting guru Robert McKee “And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.”
ahem, anyway I’m just glad he got to make another film, even if it feels like he’s mocking the fingerprints of others that we might spy all over it.
The film doesn’t actually reference what I was banging on about earlier, or even his own works: the clearest summation of what this flick is like is actually Wolf Creek, which is another flick that would never get made today in as nasty a package.
Except instead of wolves, it’s sharks!
Get this – the dangerous animal referred to in the title is not, actually, sharks, I think you’ll find. It’s humans! Specifically, it’s a man, specifically it’s this man played by Jai Courtney. I’m not entirely sure he’s playing a character.
Sure, he’s called Tucker, but really, he could have just been called Jai and no-one would have batted an eyelid.
I have a complicated relationship with Jai Courtney, in that I generally don’t enjoy seeing him on screen. I don’t wish him any ill or anything, he’s done nothing wrong to me; I just haven’t loved most of his performances in anything I’ve ever seen, and like I said that’s been a lot of movies. Movies and franchises you don’t even remember he’s been in until you see them listed.
Whatever else I’ve said now or in any other review about him, he is absolutely perfect as this character. Like, perfectly cast. I entirely believed him in this role.
Of course, the role is that of a perverted drunken serial killer who gets off on feeding people to sharks while videotaping it.
The character you were born to play, champ.
Is he our main character, though? For much of the flick, whether he was dancing inappropriately in his speedos while drinking that most appalling of beers, being XXXX, I thought he was, and whether they were going to pull a Mick Taylor and have him wander off into the sunset in order to kill again one day.
But no, unfortunately, probably the main protagonist is the awkwardly named Zephyr (American Hassie Harrison), who is a loner and a surfer who makes the mistake / has the good fortune to hook up with a Surfers Paradise local also awkwardly called Moses (Josh Heuston). Zephyr probably doesn’t know this but Josh Heuston’s claim to fame is being impossibly handsome and the lecherous Dusty in the Netflix reboot of Heartbreak High. He’s so painfully handsome he’s kind of like the opposite end of a spectrum that has Jai Courtney at the other end
Zephyr doesn’t care about any of that. She just cares about catching waves, and not forming ties with anyone, because of the trauma of growing up in foster homes, and the constant sequence of betrayal that represents. I mean this with all the certainty I can muster: boo hoo. How could you skip out the next morning on such a pretty man? For shame, girl.
Anyway, the whole point of that is, at least one person knows your American ass is in Australia, and, god forbid, if some lunatic serial killer kidnapped you in order to videotape you being eaten by a shark, then maybe at least one person might try and find you, under these unlikely circumstances.
Poor Moses, you were just something for her to rub against at best, or a plot device at worst.
Every beat, every trope is recognisable, familiar and has been depicted and experienced by all of us many times before (if you’ve ever watched movies about people trying to get away from a fixated killer, which is 90 per cent of horror flicks). There is no amount of “why would you do that, why wouldn’t you finish him off and instead…” yelling at the screen that will stop the hits from coming. An accomplished filmmaker, which I’m going to assume Sean Byrne is, knows that frustration will rise in the audience, and works with it, in fact exacerbates it to full effect. This being a crowdpleasing version of that kind of horror film, there is perhaps too much emphasis on getting the flick to an ending that would not be out of place on one of the endless sequence of Scream movies.
But none of that means it ain’t enjoyable. I enjoy this slick kind of genre work. I might not have warmed to the protagonists, and I might still have a certain amount of loathing for Jai Courtney, but no-one would dare argue he is ill suited to this role.
His every grunt, his every nasty remark, the way he looks like he sweats rancid butter, the way he dances drunkenly to Evie (Part One) by Stevie Wright (because of course he does), his every guttural utterance is perfect for this character and film, and yet somehow detrimental to humanity. I rarely if ever want characters to die in anything, even when there horrible people. I certainly didn’t want any of the other people he served to his shark gods to die, or the ones he had to murderise independent of sharks in order to cover his tracks. But if and when his death comes in this flick, you better believe I yelled “finally!” and lit a cigarette afterwards.
A whole actual cigarette, none of that vaping bullshit.
Even with an American character, this is a painfully Australian horror flick that has characters wearing solidly Australian band t-shirts even if they’re improbably discussing Creedence Clearwater Revival songs 50 years later than they were ever relevant (and the flick sneaks in some Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, which is chef’s kiss funny).
And it’s solid. Solidly Australian, like colonialism, beer and chauvinism.
7 times this country needs to be feeding more bad people to sharks out of 10
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“Tell me that ain’t the greatest show on Earth” – I take it you never watched The Great British Sewing Bee, then? - Dangerous Animals
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