THE ANIMAL KINGDOM - Mark Reviews Movies

The Animal Kingdom, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2024

Set in a world in which some people start mutating into human-animal hybrids, The Animal Kingdom takes an admirably grounded but disappointingly shallow approach to its science-fiction premise. It's an allegory, for sure, about prejudice, as well as how individuals and society at large are frightened of and don't know how to react to change, but that's about the end of its thematic ambitions.

For the most part, the rest of director Thomas Cailley and Pauline Munier's screenplay is a human story, in which a father and son try to adapt to one significant transformation of their family, only to face the imminent arrival of yet another. The opening scene here is fairly clever in the way it focuses on an argument between François (Romain Duris) and his teenage son Émile (Paul Kurcher) about the use of visiting the man's wife and the teen's mother anymore, before the debate and the lull of a traffic jam are interrupted by a most unusual scene. Out of the back of an ambulance, a man with a bandaged face and, more to the point, a row of feathers on one arm breaks free and begins leaping across car roofs.

The scene does a lot in establishing the movie's attention to the human drama, the mindset that something so extraordinary is basically commonplace in this world, and, obviously, its central conceit. No, neither François nor Émile is particularly fazed by the sight of a man-bird hybrid, apart from the fear that it might attack, because they know about this condition all too well.

The woman they're on their way to visit, after all, has undergone a similar transformation, although François' wife, now kept in a hospital room, is becoming more and more like a wolf every day. Émile is hesitant to even see his mother at this point, because he's convinced she's no longer his mother or even, for that matter, human.

When a new center for these hybrids opens early and his mother is assigned for a transfer, Émile resents that his father is making him upend his life for someone he doesn't recognize anymore and the increasingly unlikely hope that a cure for this condition will be found. He also, though, resents his dad for putting his mother in the hospital in the first place, even though François only did after his wife attacked their son, leaving a scar across the boy's face.

The two move closer to the new facility. Émile starts at a new school, lying that he moved on account of a job opportunity for his father and that his mother is dead. Soon after arriving, François receives a phone call. The bus transporting the hybrid patients to the facility crashed, and upon arriving at the scene of the accident, a local cop named Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) informs the him that his wife is not among the dead. This means she's likely hiding in the forest, where many hybrids have escaped for safety and to behave according to their new natures.

The remainder of the tale deals with two components. The first is François' determination to find his wife, despite the warning from Julia that the military have been called in to handle the growing hybrid "problem." The second is Émile discovering that his own body is changing. Claws are pushing out from under his fingernails, and a back tooth falls out, only to be replaced by a fang. Thick hair is growing on his arms and back, and his spine is realigning in a strange way.

Émile attempts to hide these changes, because some of his classmates and the town locals have a hateful or even violent attitude toward these "creatures," as they're officially referred to as, or "critters," as they're more dismissively called (There are few exceptions, including a girl, played by Billie Blain, who later likes the idea that Émile is changing). He starts spending more time in the forest, presumably looking for his mother and developing a friendship with the bird-human hybrid, who calls himself Fix (Tom Mercier) and cares for a girl who is partly a lizard, from the opening scene. Émile is worried to tell his father, of course, because he fears he'll end up locked away like his mother had been.

It's all pretty straightforward and unchallenging, either as drama or allegory, because both elements are simply presented without much depth. While the performances—especially from Duris, playing a man haunted by regret and, depending on what happens with his son, now facing the potential for more pain—are solid, there's little avoiding how the gimmicky concept here gets in the way of these characters and their dilemmas feeling real (The makeup work for the creatures is effective, but some shaky visual effects add to that sense, too).

That the whole story revolves around a theme as thin as the dangers of prejudice doesn't help matters, either. The Animal Kingdom starts with some promise but refuses to expand its ideas beyond the most obvious and superficial level.

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