MY ANIMAL - Mark Reviews Movies

My Animal, Paramount Global Content Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 7, 2023

The only thing more difficult than being a werewolf, apparently, is being a teenager in love. That's the gist of My Animal, an atmospheric but shallow melodrama about the trials of a teenage werewolf who might as well not be one.

The focus here isn't on the supernatural elements of screenwriter Jae Matthews' story, but on very down-to-earth ones, making half of the premise an unnecessary metaphor for the tale that's actually being told. It comes across that way, too, in director Jacqueline Castel's debut feature.

Set in a Canadian town at some point during the 1980s or early '90s, the story revolves around Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), who doesn't attend high school, works at the community ice rink, and has dreams of playing goalie on the local adult hockey team. Heather is an outsider, mainly because she's quiet, lives such a relatively secluded life, and dresses in what most of the townspeople see as more masculine clothing.

When people do talk about her, it's mostly in judgmental rumors and gossip. None of that, though, actually gets at the reason why Heather spends so much time alone and away from people other than her family.

She's a werewolf—a fact that's made more or less clear with the movie's opening scene, showing Heather on all fours in the living room of her home on the night of a full moon. Some slick camera moves and quick editing vaguely communicate that Heather has transformed into a wolf, runs through the woods, doesn't do much of anything, and makes her parents worried about what she might do, if allowed to roam free again.

Her father Henry (Stephen McHattie), who is also a werewolf but has made a pretty comfortable life for himself under the circumstances, starts shackling his eldest child to her bed and locking her bedroom door on nights of a full moon. That's because Heather's mother Patti (Heidi von Palleske) drinks too much to keep track of something so vital.

Until the third act, that's basically the extent of what Heather's existence as a lycanthrope means to this tale, which is to say that it doesn't really matter. It makes the character a social outcast, based on who she is and something about herself that she can hide but can't stop from being—even if she would want to do so.

Here, then, is the setup for an inherently redundant premise, because Heather is primarily defined by another characteristic in this story. She's gay—a fact that's made quite clear as she stands on all fours watching women wrestlers on TV and when Jonny (Amandla Stenberg) arrives in town. Jonny's a teenage figure skater, who's coached by and performs with her father (played by Scott Thompson), and as soon as the new girl shows up at the ice rink, Heather is clearly smitten.

In other words, Heather is a social outcast, based on who she is and something about herself that can hide but can't stop from being—even if she would want to do so. If the werewolf angle here is a metaphor for Heather's existence as a lesbian, what's the point of making her sexuality such a core component of this tale? If the central purpose here is to examine and explore how Heather's sexuality makes her an outsider in this time and place, what's the point of adding the werewolf material in the first place?

The problem isn't necessarily that the movie confuses and merges subtext and text. It's that these two modes of storytelling—a grounded drama about Heather's struggles after falling for Jonny and a horror tale about a young woman dealing with the terror of some preternatural curse—are so distinct and distinctly portrayed here that the two pieces never quite fit together. The horror elements come across as an almost cynical or deceptive way to prop up the real story, either to make the movie more marketable or to add a layer of suspense that feels more heightened than the confounding nature of young love.

That's too bad, because the romance here shows some potential—not only on its face (Both Menuez and Stenberg are quite good), but also because of the trickiness of Heather trying to be herself in a place that won't accept such a person and during a time when such prejudice is accepted as commonplace. Because Matthews and Castel have to balance that realistic story with the requirements of the horror elements, the more intriguing, relatable, and intimate side of the movie are short-changed.

My Animal, then, becomes more about its mood (The abundance of red lighting in just about every locale almost reaches the level of parody) than its two-pronged story, which is an issue unto itself, and characters, who are gradually defined primarily by what happens to them. To be sure, it is quite moody, with the stark look of the chilly backdrop and the central performances conveying so much angst, but it's obvious there's a lot more potential in here than just that—either as a star-crossed romance or as an allegorical horror story.

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