Shot by Shot Reviews of Film and TV

There’s a film embedded with a message, and then there’s a message embedded with a film, when the message is telegraphed to the point of exhaustion.

Animal Kingdom is a 2023 French language film set in a world at the outset of a pandemic where people randomly turn into wild animals. In the midst of it a father is trying to save his son from suffering the same fate as the mother.

There is no ambivalence to the message Animal Kingdom is built upon. But to do it in as unoriginal, as uninspired a fashion as it does, came as a shock. Perhaps it is one of those films that might have played better for me if I had come to it with absolutely no expectations of what I was about to see. I had watched the film’s trailer earlier in the day. As the film revealed itself I already anticipated much of what was to happen. And there lies my biggest complaint. That for a film from 2023, it felt incredibly derivative of popular films from the past 40 years in how it tackled the story. I could not understand why Animal Kingdom had been so lauded.

On a technical level, the film is decently executed. Good make-up effects. Decent cinematography, Music. Competently directed within the constraints of the so-so script it had to work with. Romain Duris, playing the father, is the highlight.

Taking into account the obvious limitations of the film-makers I would have suggested that they decide on either tackling the story of the father or the son. A good film-maker could have tackled both to great effect. Here, however we end up with the film-makers being tackled by trying to focus on both.

At the heart of the issue lies the lack of dimension of the main characters. The “Bird boy” is probably the most fleshed out character, in a story that holds so many possibilities, all of which abandons in order to do the most banal story possible regarding the trending topics of the day – conservation and xenophobia.

It is difficult not to feel like I am putting more thought into this review than the writers and director of Animal Kingdom gave it.

If I had to take a guess, the project’s origin must have played out like this. Writer/Director Thomas Cailley is enjoying a brandy with his producer. The subject drifts to ecology. The producer declares that is a subject worthy of him. Does the Writer/Director have any idea to build upon? Writer/Director rubs his chin. ‘I do… For a while now I’ve been working on a story about Humans and nature. That’s right, they’re returning to nature.’
‘Oh? How do they do that?’
‘It just happens.’
‘Oh, and what happens?’
‘I told you already.’
‘Right, right. It’s greenlit! We start shooting in a month.’
How else could so empty a vessel of a film be the result? I am being far too harsh, I realise that. But that is only because there is a brief stretch of the film when it did taunt me by piquing my interest. The crime is that it lasts barely ten minutes and comes near the end of the film, teasing the viewer that an opportunity to experience something interesting was robbed from them. It contains not a single word of dialogue. It is not superb but it does what the rest of the film should have done but failed to do. And that is, it had me. Because for the first time the film maker was contemplating the animal kingdom. Only to then abandon it entirely to return to the easy route. Which I suppose is a better summation of humanity’s relationship with nature than anything this film has to say.