And of course, occult rites are their own form of this as well.

Even in A Dark Song, Sophia undergoes the torment of the ritual experience because she CAN believe that gold flakes of redemption will fall from heaven over her grief.

Countless attempts have to have been made and fail in order for the rules to be understood in the ways that Solomon purports to understand them in A Dark Song.

Failure is truly terrible in a ritual like this. Demonic, soul-eating, existence-voiding.

How many people must have ended in a slip?

The ritual is, all of the time, convoluted, strange, and intensely precise.

There’s a bug here that crawled into my brain:

Allowing occult ritual to be real, how is it discovered to work?

The tone is dark, discomfiting. The ritual, much of the time, takes the form of abuse.

We have to wonder if Solomon is truly afraid of error or taking advantage of Sophia to live a fantasy of holding arcane wisdom and authority. Is that flake of light a sign or a tormented hallucination?

The film’s events are isolated, its scenes protracted. We are inside the process.

It’s not a one-room story, but it is a one-house story, and I can’t help but imagine how engrossing this would be staged as a live play.

Once Sophia and Solomon enter the home they’ve rented to undertake this months-long ritual, we watch it unfold, step by step, doubt by doubt, omen by omen.

This is the duration of the film.

In Jaws, it’s the inkling of doubt amid self certainty that shapes the hero’s journey. In Dangerous Animals, it shapes the villain’s fall.

The sharks in both films are ultimately the stakes and not the conflict. Even if they’re very good at chomping. And breathtaking to watch.

Enjoy the dive!

However, Tucker has caught a more dangerous creature than he expects in his net. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is an off-grid surfer and a survivor.

Despite holding control, Tucker’s performances toward Zephyr seem intent to prove his superiority. Something we can also tell he doesn’t truly believe.

Tucker sings Baby Shark. He dances his frustrations out.

And at every turn, he waxes on dangerous animals. Sharks, of course. But also coral snakes. And blue marlins. And we come to realize he’s the kind of ideologically incoherent, nihilistic narcissist that has become the villainy of 2025.

Actor Jai Courtney docks a beastly performance as Tucker – a swim-with-the-sharks tour guide, a tank of a man and a traumatized manchild, the kind of empathic psychopath we’re all lucky are a rare breed.

(There's no audio in this clip. The face acting says it all.)

Dangerous Animals swims down another channel.

Here, the villain is simply Man. A man, really. Tucker.

Tucker exploits the nature of sharks to murder his victims on videotape. Perhaps, he’s even a stand-in for sharksploitation directors.

Weeeeeee're baaaack.

#hauntalong has a group of ttrpg wrting/arting/playing friends chatting about their favorite horror movies.

This year, we've got a full month of recos, and we'll truly push Bluesky's threading feature well beyond the black rainbow.

Come haunt along with us.

The second act suspends us in the estate's concentric dream of a conversation pit, the entire room like a lens with locked in focus and a wide-open aperture. Finely detailed, luxuriously softened.

I could stay here forever.

No hint at what awaits beyond. But a promise of stranger things.