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Despite its literally generic title, The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne animal) is nothing like any of the other films and TV series called Animal Kingdom (without the “the”) that came before — be they dark Australian crime dramas, cartoons or nature documentaries.
Instead, French director Thomas Cailley’s thoughtful if somewhat desultory sophomore follow-up to 2014’s Love at First Fight proposes a world very much like our own now, one where mutations in human genetics are causing people to transform irrevocably into hybrids with other species. Sensitively filtered through the story of a father, François, and his teenage son Emile (Romain Duris and Paul Kircher, respectively) already coping with the family’s mother turning into a wolf-woman, the script co-written by Cailley and Pauline Munier keeps the people — whatever their nature — in the foreground. Nevertheless, the weightier themes of ecology, tolerance of diversity and how communities cope with massive, uncontrollable natural disasters (it was shot during the pandemic) are palpable just under the surface, like feathers forming under skin.
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The Animal Kingdom
Cast: Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adele Exarchopoulos, Tom Mercier, Billie Blain, Nathalie Richard, Saadia Bentaieb
Director: Thomas Cailley
Screenwriters: Thomas Cailley, Pauline Munier
2 hours 12 minutes
It’s a premise one could see easily being used as the stem cells for an Anglophone version, either as another film or even a prestige TV series, especially since the real heart of the film is not the father, played by French star Duris (who has a certain lupine quality himself), but young Emile. Kircher endows the character with what can only be described as animal grace as the 17-year-old finds himself transforming into some unspecified canine creature, maybe a wolf, or perhaps a fox or Labradoodle. Resembling a young Keanu Reeves circa the original Bill and Ted movies with his fluffy drape of hair and gangly frame, Kircher transmutes his character’s teenage gormlessness into the mute stillness and nobility of an omnivore by subtle degrees as the film goes on. Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they’re lapping up breakfast cereal with their tongues and the next they’re running through forests and palling around with bird-men and frog-girls.
After a smash-and-go opening sequence that finds François and a still-fully-human Emile stuck in traffic — which is further disrupted by the escape from an ambulance of an actual bird man (later introduced to us as Fix and played by Tom Mercier with athletic prowess) — father and son move from Paris to southwest France. They are trying to stay close to Emile’s mother, who is being transferred to a secure facility for mutated “creatures” or “beasties” as the new human-animal entities are called in the English subtitles.
Sadly, she escapes during transport, along with Fix and several other mutants, and François and Emile must search for her in the nearby woodlands. The locations used, according to the press notes, were ancient old growth forests in the Landes de Gascogne National Park, whose primeval ecology perfectly suits the story. Sadly, terrible wildfires forced the film crew to find additional locations in 2022 after one key lagoon location was destroyed.
When Emile arrives at a new high school to finish his final year, he’s keen to make new friends, especially with friendly vegetarian classmate Nina (Billie Blain), who identifies as neurodiverse due to her ADHD diagnosis. So for Emile, the emergence of claws in his fingers and hair all over his back is a source only of embarrassment and shame at first, like the symptoms of a second puberty. Plus, like so many people from impoverished rural areas, many of the locals — like François’ boss at a restaurant where he finds work as a chef — express antipathy to the new, incomprehensible creatures among them and are inclined to shoot on sight. Others, like François’ co-worker Naima (Saadia Bentaieb), whose sister has embraced the life aquatic now that she’s turn into a giant fish, are more sympathetic.
The parallels with the everywhere-increasing right-wing antipathy to immigrants, LGBTQ+ folk and anyone who’s supposedly “different” is obvious, perhaps even a little too on the nose. But Cailley and Munier’s script also lightly adds dimension to this picture by tracing the tensions between urbanites and country communities via the conflict between federal forces muscling in on the hunt for the escaped hybrids and local officers like Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos). There’s just the barest whiff of a romance on the brew between her and François, but the film is more interested in the relationships between the young people like Emile and Nina and between people in various states of trans-species-substantiation, like Emile and Fix. The latter two become friends in the forest and Emile gradually helps Fix learn how to fly in a dynamic action montage that makes good use of drone cameras.
Throughout, the visuals supervised by DP David Cailley (Thomas Cailley’s brother) are strong — be it the aerial shots of the forest, the fast tracking shots on the ground as Emile and others whirl though the undergrowth, or the handheld naturalism of everyday scenes, whose slight tremors and natural lighting have become the universal signifiers of the quotidian in French cinema and beyond.
That naturalism extends to the seamless way the film blends VFX with old-school prosthetics and make-up to dress the trans-species characters, and there’s very little of the uncanny valley look of green-screen shoots. The inevitable North American remake will no doubt pump more technology into its iteration, but a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.
Full credits
Cast: Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adele Exarchopoulos, Tom Mercier, Billie Blain, Nathalie Richard, Saadia Bentaieb
Production companies: Nord-Ouest Films, Studiocanal, France 2 Cinema, Artemis Productions
Director: Thomas Cailley
Screenwriters: Thomas Cailley, Pauline Munier
Producers: Pierre Guyard
Associate producers: Christophe Rossingnon, Philip Boeffard
Director of photography: David Cailley
Set design: Julia Lemaire
Costume designer: Ariane Daurat
Editor: Lilian Corbeille
Music: Andrea Laszlo de Simone
Sound designer: Nicolas Becker
Special effects make-up: Frederic Laine, Jean-Christophe Spadaccini, Pascal Molina
VFX: Cyrille Bonjean, Bruno Sommier
Casting: Ophelie Brueder
Sales: Studiocanal
2 hours 12 minutes
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