Harmful Animals has a killer hook: Jai Courtney stars as a deranged serial killer who makes use of sharks as his weapon of alternative.
It sounds bonkers, like one thing you’d see in an outdated Batman comedian, in an Austin Powers film, or on late-night TV, again when the adverts had been all 1-900 numbers. However props to screenwriter Nick Lepard and director Sean Byrne. They bring about blood and chunk to this funky premise, delivering a film that is deep in dread, sweat, thrills, and chills.
Positive, when sharks swim into horror, issues can get fairly gnarly. The all-time basic is Jaws, the place the gore of chewed-up human stays is balanced with an interesting character-driven drama. Splashier slaughters got here from that seminal movie’s extra vicious offspring, starting from the shark slasher Deep Blue Sea to extra sensible thrillers like The Shallows and 47 Meters Down, with the over-the-top Jason Statham journey The Meg and the proudly trashy Sharknado movie sequence taking a extra gonzo strategy to the subgenre.
But, Harmful Animals is not of this breed. As a substitute, sharks on this film are type of a bait and swap for one thing extra shocking and way more sinister.
Harmful Animals is extra serial killer horror than shark creature characteristic.
Hassie Harrison performs Zephyr in “Harmful Animals.”
Credit score: IFC Movies
These acquainted with Sean Byrne’s earlier movies is probably not stunned to find the sharks aren’t the scariest issues in Harmful Animals. No shade to those kings of the ocean. Cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe and editor Kasra Rassoulzadegan masterfully seize and edit pictures of sharks swimming with a scrumptious sense of menace. Some such scenes are so hanging in the way in which they painting the ability and measurement of those creatures that it actually took my breath away. However sharks usually are not the monsters on this film. They’re simply being sharks!
The monster right here is Tucker (Courtney), a sun-cooked Aussie who makes a dwelling on the Gold Coast by taking vacationers out on his boat to go on shark dives. Positive, many come and go along with nothing however a brush with nature and blissful reminiscences. However from the movie’s horrifying opening sequence, audiences are made conscious of Tucker’s darkish facet. It is not simply chum this rugged fellow tosses overboard to the sharks. He feeds them ritualistically, feeling a deep connection to the beasts and taking particular pleasure in watching them feast — on younger girls particularly.
That is in keeping with Byrne’s model of horror, which tends to middle the horrible issues mankind does to its personal. The Aussie filmmaker made his debut with 2009’s The Beloved Ones, which centered on a teen woman taking out her most twisted wishes on a kidnapped crush. Then in 2015 got here The Satan’s Sweet, starring Ethan Embry as a household man (and metalhead) who strives to guard his teen daughter from the homicidal urges of a mentally in poor health (or arguably possessed) outdated man.
Harmful Animals feels a pure development for Byrne, containing the heavy-metal power of his sophomore movie with the sadistic glee of his first. And Courtney proves his pitch-perfect collaborator in making a film that is unrelentingly twisted and rousingly entertaining.
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Jai Courtney is a rip-roaring drive of nature in Harmful Animals.
Jai Courtney performs a serial killer who makes use of sharks as a weapon in “Harmful Animals.”
Credit score: IFC Movies
The Australian actor has had a captivating profession, having been floated as a doable predecessor for Bruce Willis within the universally panned A Good Day to Die Exhausting in 2013. He is appeared in a number of motion franchise films since then, from Divergent to Terminator: Genisys to 2016’s Suicide Squad and its odd 2021 pseudo-sequel. However solely the final of those — the place he performed the wild card DC supervillain Captain Boomerang — gave a way of the distinctive dichotomy of Courtney’s skills.
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Broad-shouldered and good-looking, he is a pure match for the motion hero mildew. However his efficiency in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad confirmed Courtney could possibly be humorous and get bizarre with it. It was an exhilarating rush to observe him do exactly that. In Harmful Animals, he’s unleashed. Overlook the intense brooding or dashing swagger of bog-standard main males. Courtney has one thing extra uncommon and beguiling, a crooked smile that guarantees hassle and a wild eye that threatens carnage.
In Harmful Animals, Tucker’s sheer brute drive makes him scary. However Courtney, discovering the enjoyable in enjoying such a monster, makes the character immediately iconic. He’s so undeniably charming in tourist-pleasing mode that it is simple to see how his prey is lured in. For the free-spirited surfer named Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), the heroine on the coronary heart of Harmful Animals, he disarms her by providing her a favor — no strings hooked up. However simply as shortly as he can flash his tooth in a smile, he can chunk. And this makes Byrne’s film greater than only a torrid thriller.
Harmful Animals is a mesmerizing horror story about poisonous masculinity.
Tucker loves the sound of his personal voice. Whereas maintaining girls locked away in an successfully sound-proofed cell on his boat, he delivers unwelcomed speeches concerning the nature of animals. Courtney captures the snarling bravado heard on numerous macho podcasts, as he drops enjoyable information about sharks, snakes, and marlins, making use of a philosophical varnish on his violence in opposition to girls. However the visible particulars of Tucker’s ritual, which includes classic VHS tapes and DIY lures, recommend a extra psychological motive rooted in misogyny. And this psychology is simply as disturbing because the scenes of violence and slaughter by shark.
In Harmful Animals, Byrne and Courtney give us a mesmerizing portrait of poisonous masculinity. Tucker compares himself to sharks, as a result of as a person he feels inadequate, particularly within the face of ladies like Zephyr. There’s even an implication of impotence that evokes Luis Buñuel’s The Legal Lifetime of Archibaldo de la Cruz, the place a person aspires to homicide girls however by no means does so by his personal hand. Equally, Tucker makes use of sharks to commit his crimes.
Terrifying in a real-world sense, Tucker has mastered hiding his rage till he is out on the ocean, the place there’s nowhere to run. The way in which he can swap from an affable bogan to a snarling beast is riveting, not just for Courtney’s quickness but in addition as a result of this horrible transformation displays a typical concern girls have that any random smiling man on the road may be a monster simply beneath the floor. (See the man versus bear debate of 2024.)
Remarkably, as thematically darkish as Harmful Animals is, watching it’s electrifying and wickedly enjoyable. Whether or not small-talking with a scruffy native, rigging up a sufferer for feeding time, or dancing round ritualistically to rock music in crimson underwear, Courtney is a dwell wire, sparking so intensely that his villain appears able to something.
Cheers to Harrison who matches his power with a stable disgust as Zephyr. Collectively, they construct a cat-and-mouse story that’s jolting, in the way in which of Byrne’s earlier movies. Simply whenever you suppose you understand the place Harmful Animals goes, it dives even deeper and darker, and we’re left catching our breath.
Merely put, Harmful Animals is a satisfying, sick, and devilishly good thriller that can excite you in theaters and stalk you on the way in which dwelling.
Harmful Animals was reviewed out of its World Premiere on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition. The film will open in theaters within the U.S. on June 12.
