The Animal Kingdom: Light French Film About a Beast-Mode Epidemic Barely Flies
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
A film that wants to be a metaphor for something, the French film The Animal Kingdom is like an edgeless, absurdist high school version of The Island of Doctor Moreau. At least that story had a rallying cry, “Are we not men?”
No, ultimately, the afflicted characters in The Animal Kingdom – about a strange pathology that randomly turns humans into animals – is not about retaining humanity. At moments, it’s about our ability to carry on blithely while extraordinary things happen around us, as if we can will normality back through denial.
At others, it’s literally about learning to use the wings God gave you.
Émile (Paul Kircher) hears the call of the wild in The Animal Kingdom.
Director Thomas Cailley claims to have been inspired by one of the manifestations of the worldwide pandemic quarantine, which saw wild animals begin to encroach on deserted city streets.
He might also have been inspired by one or two werewolf movies, though the transformations in The Animal Kingdom are comparatively slow and varied.
The French themselves seem less than impressed with the film. It recently won five Césars (the French Oscars), all technical, none of them for acting or story. The costume design award seems counterintuitive, since the “humanimals” in the movie are only occasionally stark and frightening (usually a trick of lighting, the film did win for cinematography), and at other times, look like runners-up at a “furries” convention.
In The Animal Kingdom, we meet François (Romain Duris), who is portrayed as a New Agey buffoon, and his teenage son Émile (Paul Kircher), who have moved to a rural setting to be near François’ afflicted wife. Apparently, the carefully thought-out public health response to citizens morphing into animals is to hospitalize them for a while, and then ship them out to the country for le-bon-Dieu-knows-what.
Émile must negotiate a new school, where some of the students are rude to him (this is France, remember) and makes a new friend in Nina (Billie Blain), who has a neural disorder that makes her unable to hold back any thought or opinion no matter how inappropriate (here, we call that social media).
Émile is the protagonist, mainly because he begins to experience subtle changes practically as the movie begins, and that’s what we’re here for. Those changes seem doglike. And as for his mother, who is offscreen and presumed on-the-run through most of the movie, well, you’ll find out.
Co-writer Cailley doesn’t exactly overthink the effects of the animalization. At his new school, Émile’s condition asserts itself with a feat of strength at a phys ed tug-of-war. And that’s the last we see of that super-power.
The end game of the transformation is equally all over the map. Sometimes, people turn into the exact animal (wolves, bears), and at other times, they’re human-sized biped versions (a lizard-woman). But they eventually all lose the ability to speak, so the human side inevitably loses.
And then there’s Fix (Tom Mercier), a bird-man who’s understandably angry at the world and at his inability to fly (attempts toward which The Animal Kingdom replays to the point of slapstick), and who Émile embraces as a manimal mentor and friend.
There are interesting ideas at play in The Animal Kingdom, all of them explored only superficially. If the idea is that we are all animals inside, it might have been better to let them keep the ability to speak their piece (Fix is the only transformee with any extended dialogue).
Nonetheless, the actors are all game, even while wearing ridiculous costumes. And Kircher’s Émile carries off his transformation with more curiosity than teenage angst, which makes him a likeable protagonist.
The Animal Kingdom. Directed by Thomas Cailley. Written by Thomas Cailley and Pauline Munier. Stars Paul Kircher, Billie Blain and Tom Mercier. Opens Friday, March 15 in Toronto at the TIFF Lightbox and in Vancouver at the VIFF Centre.