CANNES – Imagine the world completely changing over the span of just two years. No, there hasn’t been an apocalyptic nuclear war. Sadly, first contact hasn’t been achieved with aliens. And, in the most likely scenario, the planet hasn’t upended itself because of the climate crisis. Instead, the people closest to you are being transformed by fast-acting mutations that turn them into hybrid animals. That’s the often-horrifying premise of Thomas Cailley’s “Le Regne Animal (The Animal Kingdom,” which opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
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The movie starts off benignly enough. François (Romain Duris) and his teenage son Émile (Paul Kircher) are stuck in a traffic jam attempting to visit his wife, Lana, who has been in long-term care at a local hospital. When an incident occurs in an ambulance nearby, the two men encounter a human-bird hybrid attempting to escape medical custody. For a hot second, you might think the film is veering into a Sci-Fi action flick and it sort of will, eventually, but Cailley has other concerns to address first.
It turns out that Lana is one of the victims of this strange new pandemic (a term strangely never uttered in the film) and is scheduled to be reassigned to a government containment facility in the South of France. Despite being fiercely anti-establishment, François still believes the doctors will find a way to contain or reverse her mutations (there appears to be some medical treatment that is barely working). Emile, on the other hand, is frightened of what his mother has become and doesn’t believe she even remembers her family anymore. That’s one of the more disturbing aspects of Cailley’s premise. The more someone changes into a creature (or “critter”) the less human they become. These aren’t the cute hybrids of Netflix’s “Sweet Tooth” who are intelligent and just trying to co-exist with the civilized world. Most of these creatures lose their sense of being, the ability to communicate, and, seemingly, memories of who they once were. They are effectively animals, eating what their new form would want to eat, reacting in dangerous conditions as though they were a gigantic condor, bull, or wolf because effectively they are.
Despite Emile’s frustrations about leaving his friends in school, François packs up their things and gets a temporary culinary job in a small French town to be closer to his wife at the new facility. Soon after, an accident finds many creatures let loose into the local forest including Lana. As François illegally scours the forest in hopes of finding Lana himself, he befriends a frustrated local police officer, Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who helps him while spending most of her screentime complaining about the new military presence that has been called in to capture the escaped creatures.
“The Animal Kingdom” is truly Emile’s story, however. Embarrassed over his mother’s state and anxious about a new school, he finds a spark of joy in Nina (Billie Blain), a classmate whose ADHD may give her a heads up that things are not as always they seem. And then, Emile’s life seemingly shatters. He realizes, like his mother, he too is beginning to transform.
The movie hinges in many ways on familiar themes of human ignorance and fears over anything different but simply doesn’t resonate beyond a surface level. Any allegories to the migrant crisis in Europe or adolescent discovery of sexual identity are almost completely glossed over. It’s more disheartening that it hints at these issues than even attempts to tackle them. Moreover, when some of the townspeople show their true colors you wonder if this is actually how humans would react during such a traumatic time. The movie depicts life going on in a manner that is too hard to believe just 24 months into this major event in the 50,000-plus years of human civilization.
Unfortunately, Cailley’s conventional cinematic aesthetic is also often akin to a contemporary streaming movie (the first thirty minutes or seem like a television pilot) and while the visual effects are solid, there are few images that will stick with you hours after you’ve left the theater. What saves “The Animal Kingdom” is the genuine horror over this happening to anyone (Cailley gets that right, at least) and Kircher’s fantastic performance.
The 21-year-old actor conveys Émile’s panic and frustration over the initial signs of his mutation and shows genuine skill in slowly integrating his character’s new animal tendencies as the days go by. Kircher is so compelling he almost singularly makes the viewer emotionally invested in Emile’s survival. Perhaps there will be more to care about in the eventual sequel. Maybe. [C+]
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