The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net

In Strange Beasts, the Australian director Darcy Prendergast captures his father Ron Prendergast’s story of working at the Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari in Victoria, Australia, which operated in the 1970s and ’80s. In a gripping baritone, Ron recalls the acutely unsafe conditions of the peculiar tourist destination where visitors paid to drive through a large, fenced-in area populated by lions and tigers. In particular, he tells how, in the park’s closing days, with little training and without the aid of tranquillisers, he was tasked with wrangling tigers – an assignment that, rather unsurprisingly, nearly left him dead. Combining a wide range of animation styles, archival imagery, reenactments and newly shot footage of his father, Darcy Prendergast crafts an absorbing work on fear, youthful indiscretion and the precarious border between human and nonhuman animal worlds.