Film 'Animals': Confusing Plot and Soulless Direction

Amjad Jamal: Many may disagree about Ben Affleck the actor, as his presence before the camera has remained controversial since his early days. However, few dispute Ben Affleck the director, who delivered Gone Baby Gone and The Town before his masterpiece Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture. Affleck has proven more than once that he is a high-caliber thriller maker who knows how to keep audiences on edge. For this reason, anticipation for his next directorial effort remains high among cinema lovers worldwide. Yet his latest film, Animals, produced by Netflix, was disappointing, resembling a wild shot fired by a talented director. We would not call it a cinematic catastrophe, as it has some merits and a number of amusing moments, but it lacks almost everything we loved in Affleck’s thrilling cinema: breathless moments, distinctive chase sequences, tight narrative construction, and a masterful climax. One might even wonder after watching it: Did Affleck really direct this film?

The plot follows the wrongful kidnapping of Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck), an American lawyer who inherited his profession and wealth from his father. He is the head of a small family comprising his young son, Danny, and his wife, psychologist Abigail (Kerry Washington). Mark decides to run for mayor of Los Angeles as an independent candidate, launching a difficult campaign funded by his own money and depleting his savings. But life turns upside down when he receives news that his son has been kidnapped by an unknown gang demanding a ransom of seven million dollars, or the boy will be killed.

Mark’s campaign manager, Sam, steps in to help, turning to a mysterious woman named Dale Burton (Gillian Anderson), who specializes in resolving such crises. She possesses the funds to lend him money, as well as plans, weapons, and ideas. Then comes the first surprise: the gang did not kidnap Danny, but another child named Hector, the son of Ramon, the Mexican worker who is dating Cecilia, the housekeeper. Does this change the situation? It might alter it, but it does not fundamentally change it. A mayoral candidate’s family cannot ignore the kidnapping of a Mexican child or collude in its outcome, especially since Mark needs votes from Latino constituents.

On the periphery lies a thread related to the crisis. Cecilia had asked the family to hire her boyfriend, Ramon, but the family refused because he lacks legal residency in the United States, and hiring him could damage the candidate’s reputation. Later, this man’s son himself becomes the price at which Mark bargains his political campaign.

When masks fall, the film’s title, Animals, is not arbitrary. The “animals” referred to here are all humans when tested by the distance between instinct and declared principles. The film attempts to reveal how fragile those principles are and how animalistic instincts drive the characters. What changed when Mark learned that the kidnapped child was not his son? The panic stemming from his instinct vanished in an instant, replaced by a simpler kind of worry concerning his narcissism and selfishness as a candidate who wants to appear perfect to the public. The fear is no longer for a child’s life, but for his image as a man. This contradiction reaches another level in one of the film’s smartest dialogues, when Mark discovers his wife’s infidelity and asks her about the other man: “Is he a black man?” This question carries a bitter irony; why does he care about such a detail? He has forgotten the catastrophe itself—that his wife is cheating on him—and is preoccupied with a superficial detail that exposes the racial biases in his mind, which completely contradicts his campaign speech, in which he constantly speaks about racial equality, acceptance of the other, and uniting diverse groups. Here, beneath the candidate’s elegant suit, it becomes clear that a creature driven by instinct, ego, and prejudices resides, not the values he raises as slogans. Kidnapping, ransom, and politics: Animals is most praised at the conceptual level for attempting to take the kidnapping-and-ransom story out of its usual framework as a crime drama.

The question here is no longer just how to save the child; it has become an ethical and political question: What is a child who is not your own worth? Would a wealthy man pay millions to save the son of an undocumented worker, whom he had previously refused to hire? And if he pays a ransom to save the child, does he do so out of humanitarian concern or because cameras and voters are watching? In this way, the film reveals its political class, that mirror exposing the contradictions of the elite. The gap between what the candidate says on the platform and what he does in his life is laid bare. This is compounded by marital secrets that unfold gradually, revealing that the ideal home and ideal wife (of different ethnicities) that Mark presents to his voters are, in reality, fragile and built on lies. These elements, combined, could have made a strong film, but the problem lies in the execution.

Kurosawa’s heavy-handed approach is immediately apparent to any cinematically literate viewer, who will quickly note that the film’s central premise is not new; it is nearly a replica of Akira Kurosawa’s famous Japanese film High and Low (1963), which revolves around a wealthy man who receives a ransom demand for his kidnapped son, only to discover that the kidnappers made a mistake and took his driver’s son instead, leaving him facing the same ethical dilemma. The difference is that Kurosawa’s film was a lesson in intelligence, artistry, and humanity. It succeeded in creating a state of escalating tension that is difficult to match. Furthermore, the addition of local political flavor, with details about Los Angeles municipal elections and the calculus of Latino votes, made the film less appealing to international audiences outside the United States. What appears as a life-or-death stake within the narrative seems to the distant viewer as an internal matter of little concern.

A threat without fangs and an illogical ending: The weakest aspect of the story is that the antagonists do not appear genuinely serious or frightening. The unknown gang fails to give the audience a real sense of danger, and the situation seems controllable throughout, which is fatal for any thriller. In the final quarter of the events, the plot takes unreasonable turns, to the point that we leave the film without clearly knowing who was involved in the kidnapping or what their motives were. This is an ending unworthy of a director known for carefully calibrated climaxes, such as the final confrontation in The Town or the suffocating airport scene at the end of Argo.

Visually, the film feels closer to low-budget television movies. Everything in it seems small; the domestic shots lack the aesthetic geometric compositions found in its Japanese cinematic counterpart. The scenes pass without any notable visual signature, and there is not a single chase worthy of creating genuine tension. In a film set in and about Los Angeles, the sense of the pulse of that famous city is absent.

Ben Affleck delivers a performance that oscillates between coldness and overacting, without establishing a clear tonal consistency for his character. Matt Damon was originally slated to play the role but declined due to his commitments filming The Odyssey, leading Affleck to step in as a replacement. Kerry Washington, for her part, fails in many of her emotional moments, particularly in the scene confessing the betrayal. The only clear bright spot in the acting comes from Gillian Anderson in the role of Dale Burton, the mysterious woman who moves with a low, confident voice and striking charisma, stealing every scene she appears in and providing the film with the mystery and tension it lacks. However, even this character does not escape the weakness of the screenplay; her role concludes in a disappointing manner that does not match the presence she built throughout the film.