Dir. Thomas Cailley. France. 2024. 130mins Back in 2014, French writer-director Thomas Cailley ended his debut feature, offbeat anti-romcom Love at First Fight (Les Combattants), on a curious apocalyptic note. That’s where he picks things up with long-awaited follow-up The Animal Kingdom, a bold, altogether wild-up genre mash-up. Inspired by an original script by co-writer Pauline Munier, this is a father-son story set against a nightmare background of human-to-animal mutations, with an ominous end-of-days feel and a decided streak of Cronenbergian body horror – yet at the same time, a distinctive emotional warmth in the story of its teenage protagonist.
🟢 Official trailer
Rippling with visual invention, this Un Certain Regard opening title almost has too many ideas to be easily contained in its running length; but it has all it takes to cross over beyond its domestic market and score with genre fans, followers of outré auteur invention and teens-to-20s audiences alike. It also provides a significant boost in visibility both for director Cailley and his young star Paul Kircher, the revelation of Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy (2022).
At some time, seemingly in the near future, a mysterious condition is causing people to mutate into animals – like the creature seen making an explosive appearance in the opening sequence. Another casualty is a woman named Lara, wife to chef François (Romain Duris) and mother to teenage Emile (Kircher). The pair relocate to the south of France to be nearer Lara, currently interned in a holding faculty for ‘critters’ – as unsympathetic, fearful humans call them. François takes a job at a local eaterie, while Emile settles into a new school, where he forms a promising connection with classmate Nina (Billie Blain).
When a group of animal-human hybrids escape, François is determined to comb the local forest in search of his errant wife. Meanwhile, Emile notices that his hearing is becoming more acute, and his fingernails a little sharper… As François teams up with sympathetic gendarme Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Emile finds himself increasingly drawn to the strange new breed that are now his neighbours – in particular, bonding with birdman Fix (Tom Mercier, from 2019 Berlinale winner Synonyms).
🟢 International Trailer
Much of The Animal Kingdom (not to be confused with the similarly-named 2010 Australian drama) might seem familiar: hybrid creatures in the Island of Dr Moreau tradition, icky bodily transformations as in The Fly, even hints of X-Men-style superhero imagery. What’s remarkable, though, is how cannily the film weaves its tropes together, and on what an ambitious scale. Even though it adheres mainly to a single locale, a provincial town surrounded by lush forests – it was shot in the south-western Gascony region – the staging of the action and the richly observed landscape photography by David Cailley (the director’s brother) convey an increasingly cosmic sense of a natural world rewriting its rules in the face of human incomprehension.
The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender. Notwithstanding occasional grotesque effects, the creature design, VFX and make-up departments jointly create visions of surreal beauty – not least in such simple images as a recognisably human gaze peering out from behind the scales of a person-size pangolin. Sound and FX work are impeccable all round, with a degree of perfectionism that shows the film going several notches beyond the usual standard for French genre product.
Narratively, there are provocative themes at work here: the idea of nature reprogramming itself in the era of climate catastrophe, the suggestion that we may have to ready ourselves for a post-human order, as well as the familiar science-fiction trope of critter haters as virulent racists.
Duris takes something of a backseat, but is forceful as the faintly bohemian family man trying to confront unthinkable crisis, while Exarchopoulos is by turns warm, brittle and punchy, if somewhat underused. A prosthetically transformed Mercier gives a startling, athletic performance as ornithologically-enhanced fugitive Fix, although his sequences are awkwardly out of keeping with the rest – at times perilously close to a starry-eyed Disneyfied take on superhero action. Kircher, however, pretty much owns the film as a candid, sometimes gauche, ultimately tormented embodiment of teenage vulnerability, with Emile’s fears and joys calibrated to terrifically sharp effect by a young actor whose stock is destined to soar.
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Sci-fi
Original Language: French
Director: Thomas Cailley
Producer: Pierre Guyard
Writer: Thomas Cailley, Pauline Munier
Release Date (Theaters): Mar 15, 2024 Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Mar 15, 2024
Runtime: 2h 10m
Distributor: Magnet Releasing
