The Animal Kingdom: a stunning masterpiece (review)

Socio thriller, fantasy fable, teen movie… The new film from the director of Les Combattants impresses with its emotional power and its exceptional actors.

A father and his son are in a car. The tension, the reproaches, the kid looking out the window and sighing. The father who tries by all means to gain her attention. The mother is absent and it is she who is at the heart of the discussion. We have the impression of having seen this scene a thousand times in French cinema. Besides, it’s getting bogged down. We are almost at a standstill. Like the car: the highway is stuck in a traffic jam. When suddenly, shots ring out. Something or someone is pounding on the door of the ambulance blocked a few meters away. The noise increases, the ambulance rocks, and suddenly the doors open. A shadow escapes. Actually flies away. What escaped was a half-man, half-bird creature with enormous wings. His presence sows chaos in the rows of motorists for a few minutes, but very quickly everything returns to order. This strangeness is only for us. In the world depicted by the film, this phenomenon has already occurred.

We could list other astonishing scenes: a frantic chase across the fields, a nightmarish village festival, an eagle-man trying to tame his powers in the forest… But Thomas Cailley’s film (The fighters) is entirely contained in this opening. A virtuoso piece of bravery which directly warns the viewer: what you are about to see is a pure teenage film, but also a realistic melodrama, a fantastic nugget and an allegory of our times (ecological and social). In short, a real mutant film. With the appearance of the creature, reality was devoured by gender; and this slippage, this mutationis precisely the project Animal Kingdom. We quickly understand that in the world of François (the father played by an exceptional Duris) and Emile (the son, Paul Kircher, subtle and intense) a strange epidemic affects many individuals. People inexplicably transform into wild beasts (from octopuses to wolves to birds of prey) and once transformed, society decides to lock them up. If François is in the car it is because he has to go see his wife who has become an animal herself: father and son are preparing to move to accompany her to a specialized center. We will then follow the uprooting of the two men, then their attempt to find the woman who disappeared during an accident, before a new shift. Because Emile begins to mutate in his turn, and his transformation will send the film spiraling towards an intimate epic…

The first force of Animal Kingdom is due to this constant change of tone and register. Clinging solely to his emotional trajectory, Cailley passes in one shot from the marvelous to the tragedy, from the fable to the thriller or from the comedy to the fantastic. His cinema horizon is as rich as it is varied and we feel the influence of Shyamalan, Spielberg and Carpenter as much as that of Franju. However, the whole thing never looks like a good geeky joke. We said mutant, it would be better to say hybrid as Cailley explains to us elsewhere in this magazine. Because the real power of the film lies in the way in which the filmmaker harmonizes and digests all these influences. Ecological advocacy will never take precedence over the marvelous, and philosophical and social questioning (The Animal Kingdom synthesizes the questions of Bruno Latour and Baptiste Morizot) will not crush the genre film. It is undoubtedly that all this is driven by an incredible cinematic gesture and above all by characters who constantly remain the heart of the project. By what devilry could a French filmmaker have been able to evade all the traps of the industry and produce such a spectacle? This is the question we’ve been asking ourselves since we discovered the film at Cannes. But for now, some advice: find a place in Romain Duris’ small car, fasten your seat belt, and prepare for the shock. The Animal Kingdom is a stunning masterpiece.

By Thomas Cailley. With Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adèle Exarchopoulos… Duration 2h08. Released October 4, 2023