By Mo Moshaty

There’s blood in the water and love in the air in Sean Byrne’s newest horror, DANGEROUS ANIMALS. Part horror cocktail, part killer animal flick and part “what if trauma bonded…literally?” rom/com. But it all works! Really well!

Director Sean Byrne, known for the brutal The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy, returns with a sensory gut-punch in this sea-slicked horror love story.

Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is a commitment-phobic surfer chick with avoidant attachment issues so strong they practically come with a Do Not Disturb sign. She lives in her van, loves the ocean and has mastered the art of the emotional Irish goodbye. She’s not running towards freedom, she’s just really good at running from literally everything, until she’s snatched up by a shark-obsessed serial killer named Tucker. Which, honestly, is a pretty extreme way to make someone talk about their feelings.

Enter Jai Courtney, swinging for the horror fences as Tucker, a boat captain with a conservation kink, a Messiah complex, and the emotional stability of a wet paper bag. And I say that so lovingly because Courtney is PHENOMENAL here. His Tucker is terrifying, yes, but there’s also this broken-little-boy thing bubbling underneath the madness (Courtney elaborates on Tucker in the above video). He’s less “I’m just evil” and more “I’ve never recovered from what happened to me in 3rd grade and now I kill people near sharks.” Still not a gret excuse, but for this film, it works.

_{Hassie Harrison and Jai Courtney in Dangerous Animals (2025) Courtesy of Mark Taylor. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release}

The film’ secret weapon? It’s also…weirdly romantic. No, not with Tucker. This isn’t The Shape of Water: Red Flag Edition, but with Moses, (Josh Heuston) who stumbles into Zephyr’s web before the kidnapping mess and somehow ends up the emotional glue holding it together. It’s a surprising note in a movie full of blood, bait, and scream-crying. Sometimes love is inconvenient. Sometimes it’s dangerous and sometimes it happens while you’re tied up in a boat about to be fed to sharks. Hey, we all have our meet-cutes.

Sean Byrne and screenwriter Nick Lepard know exactly what they’re doing. This isn’t a cheap Jaws rip off. It’s an indictment of how humans romanticize danger, fetishize predators, and then act surprised when we get bitten. The sharks aren’t the villains here, they’re the victims. Conservation threads run through the film like a dorsal fin: quiet, constant and sharper than you think (hear Sean Byrne’s thoughts on the film in the above video).

What really makes it sing though is how much Tucker and Zephyr mirror each other. They’re both loners, both shaped by trauma, both trying to control chaos in their own doomed ways. He kidnaps and kills, she dips and ghosts. It’s like watching two feral cats try to date, only one of them is a ritualistic murderer. Dangerous Animals is tense, darkly funny, and genuinely unnerving. It’ll make you side-eye surfboards for a while, reconsider your thoughts on solitary men with boats and maybe, just maybe, believe in a romance that’s worth getting gutted for.

Dangerous Animals releases in the US, UK and Australia on June 6th

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