The Animal Kingdom

The banter between François and Émile is playfully antagonistic but purely loving at heart. They are bickering in their car during a traffic jam when audiences are introduced to their strange new reality, as a birdman violently breaks free from an ambulance. It’s an exhilarating, jump-inducing scene. Yet François just calmly agrees with a nearby driver who comments, “Strange days.” As we’ve experienced all too clearly of late, it’s tricky to grasp the magnitude of a situation while living it.  

When word reaches them of a medical center opening in the sticks that can provide better patient care, François dislocates Émile from Paris to be closer to his mom. With father and son facing the dual struggles of absent wife/new job and absent mother/new school, respectively, they are united in alienation. But it’s taken up a notch for Émile, who discovers he is transforming (into a wolf-boy?). Many young guys in films have turned into wolves, mostly for comedic effect or exploitation value (à la Teen Wolf and I Was a Teenage Werewolf), but this case hits on the more melancholy, existential experiences of the teen girls in Ginger Snaps and When Animals Dream. Émile’s attempts to hide his condition—while developing a relationship with a cute, curious classmate, Nina (Billie Blain)—become increasingly challenging as this behavior grows more outwardly animalistic, his strength and sense of hearing heighten, and claws and fangs start materializing.

The hybrids he’s joining the ranks of are called a number of derogatory terms—“monsters,” “creatures,” “critters”—but a sympathetic cop, Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos), rightly labels them as “victims.” Julia is disenchanted, feeling underutilized working alongside only men, while a monotone Exarchopoulos similarly isn’t given enough to do. She is always a welcome presence, but she has little purpose here other than to offer François comfort and support as a search takes place for his missing wife and the busload of other patients who escaped during a crash en route to the new facilities.

Father and son embark on their own search in the forest (a prohibited place now that the mutants cohabitate there), further strengthening their connection, while a touching tale of creature-bonding also begins, as Émile endeavors to befriend the prickly birdman called Fix (a memorable Tom Mercier) and help teach him to fly. He spends more and more time in the wild outdoors, and what a rich, magical place it is—strikingly imagined and captured, and sometimes a little eerie (a nighttime manhunt through a cornfield is especially breathtaking). It’s a shame that more time isn’t spent there, though about midway through its 130-minute runtime, the film does start to bog itself down trying to smoothly balance its varying tonal elements of comedy, tragedy, fantasy, and unusually insightful body horror (you can almost feel the excruciating pain of growing fangs or wings)—as well as sneaking in jabs at France’s health-care and social systems. But it all returns triumphantly to one’s flesh and blood and the lengths relatives will go to protect one another. When François finds evidence that his son is mutating, the look of realization crossing his face that he’s losing all that’s left of his family is quietly heartbreaking. It’s the emotional domestic drama of The Animal Kingdom that leaves its sharp claws deep in you.