Sometime in the near future, the human race experiences a strange phenomenon in which random people begin to mutate into different animal species. There is no rhyme or reason to the malady but it is starting to dictate a new world order. Francois and his teenage son Emile are affected by this because Lana, Francois’s wife and Emile’s mother, is beginning to transition into some type of creature. She is currently under observation at the hospital but a decision is made to move her into a government facility in a rural area for her own protection and a possible cure. So begins Le Regne Animal (English title: The Animal Kingdom, 2023) from French director Thomas Cailley, a film that has been pigeonholed by some reviewers as a science fiction film but is actually more of a surreal fantasy.
In order to be closer to the center housing his wife, Francois (Romain Duris) leaves the city with Emile (Paul Kircher) and takes a job as a chef and café assistant in a small town near a heavily forested region. Meanwhile, Emile registers as a transfer student at the local high school but the sudden move adds increased tension to the father-son relationship which was already on shaky ground.
Despite the strange state of the world, people try to go about their daily lives as before but it becomes increasingly difficult as more and more families are affected by one of their members mutating into some type of animal. When the van transporting Francois’s wife and other patients to the local center crashes, Lana escapes into the dense forest and both Francois and Emile try to search for her but are prevented by the local police from getting involved.
Refusing to heed the warnings of the town’s authorities, Emile begins exploring the forest on his own, encountering a number of mutating humans including Fix (Tom Mercier), a semi-bird man, whom he befriends after a hostile first encounter. But it isn’t long before Emile begins to hear the call of the wild himself as he notices unusual changes in his own body.
From the first scene in The Animal Kingdom, we learn that the human/animal plague has been a problem for over two years with no end in sight. Director Cailley wisely avoids providing any backstory or details about the how and why throwing the viewer into the thick of things. The rapid fire pacing and complete immersion into a bucolic small town setting where the focus is on the villagers and local authorities helps keep disbelief at bay while state-of-the-art special effects bring a touch of magical realism to the proceedings.
Cailley also provides brief glimpses or visual teases of some of the fantastical creatures to leave you wanting more such as an octopus/squid woman at a grocery store, a tree-climbing child called Froggie with the skin of an amphibian and other mutations who are not recognizable animals like foxes, cats or monkeys but a new hybrid with human and animal features not unlike the strange inhabitants of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. In one bizarre scene, there is even a spider-like being with a human face glimpsed creeping along a street at night.
Made on a budget of 13-15 million dollars, The Animal Kingdom is a remarkably accomplished French production rivaling the look of any big budget Hollywood blockbuster yet achieving an intimacy and emotional resonance lacking in most of those overhyped major studio efforts. Cailley, who ended up collaborating with Pauline Munier on her original script when it was still at an early stage, has created the kind of fantasy that can be interpreted by the viewer on various metaphorical levels.
One of the most obvious is a post-COVID view of modern society (the script was conceived during the pandemic) where disorder and alienation erupts from quarantine enforcement as the new reality. The people depicted in The Animal Kingdom react in similar ways to how everyone dealt with the pandemic on a personal level. Some are hostile and angry, others are fearful and uncommunicative and there are those who are sympathetic, reasonable and proactive in their attempts to remedy the situation. In an interview on the Cinema Without Borders website, Cailley said, “Some people spoke to me about…how we accept difference. Some people spoke to me about the migrant crisis in Europe today. Some spoke to me about psychiatry, the situation for psychiatry, in France and Europe. Some spoke about people who are racialized, which is the French term for having a non-centralized racial identity. And others spoke to me about gender transition. I think the power of fantasy, when it works, is that not everything is resolved. You leave room for the spectator.”
Certainly, there are other issues being raised in The Animal Kingdom that have resonance for most of us – father-son relationships, the dynamics of contemporary high school life and teenage behavior, the cultural clash between city and rural residents, and environmental concerns. Still, it is the intense relationship between Francois and Emile that is the heart and soul of the film and culminates in an emotionally satisfying ending that is still open to various interpretations.
The performances are first rate and include Adele Exarchopoulous (Blue is the Warmest Color, Passages) as Julia, a sympathetic police officer who befriends Francois, Billie Blain as Nina, Emile’s new friend at school, and Israeli actor Tom Mercier as the still evolving birdman (the scene where he finally learns how to use his wings is both comical and exhilarating). Duris, one of French cinema’s most versatile and acclaimed actors, is completely convincing and empathetic as a worried father dealing with a family crisis and a rebellious teenage son, but it is Paul Kircher as Emile who becomes the central focus of The Animal Kingdom and has to do much of the heavy lifting. It’s a remarkable performance on many levels from his speech pattern to his physical movements as he begins to mutate into a fur covered critter. It helped that he had ample time to craft his characterization. Cailley said in the Cinema Without Borders interview, ” I started working with…Paul Kircher a year before the shoot started and he also trained with the choreographer to learn to use his body differently and to try to devise a physical vocabulary that was not only human and what was really interesting when he arrived on set was that all I had to do with him was to tell him to express things a little more or a little less just to vary the intensity.”
Cailley’s production crew also deserves credit for approaching the fantasy elements in a realistic way and that includes the special effects make-up, the sound design, the costume designer and the art direction. The cinematography by David Cailley (Thomas’s brother) is consistently stunning and the locations that were utilized, especially areas in the Gironde, the Landes, and part of the Lot-et-Garonne in France, are the sort of lush, pristine natural settings that could inspire a tourist invasion (let’s hope not!).
Regarding the setting, Cailley stated in an interview for the Film Review website, “We covered the region until eventually we found the perfect setting, which had the primary forest, the lagoon and the tree perched over the water. However, sadly in the summer of 2022, during filming, everything was destroyed by the Gironde fires. We were forced to stop filming, the crew left, and I stayed behind in a rain of ash to look for alternative locations to finish the film. We still had 5 weeks of work to do…all in the forest. I located a black spot on a satellite image near Biscarrosse, a very touristy seaside resort which, prior to the fires, was not at all what we were looking for. On my way there, I discovered some lagoons which were completely preserved, where due to laws dating back to the Middle Ages, forestry is impossible. It was the ideal location for us: an untouched, dense forest, which is so dense that it took 15 minutes to walk 100 meters!”
The Animal Kingdom had its world premiere in 2023 at the Cannes Film Festival as the opening night selection of Un Certain Regard and won the Lumieres Award for Thomas Cailley as Best Director. It also won Cesar Awards (the French version of the Oscars) for Best Visual Effects, Best Costume Design (Ariane Daurat), Best Original Music (Andrea Laszlo De Simone), Best Sound and Best Cinematography. It also garnered an additional seven Cesar nominations including Best Actor (Romain Duris) and Most Promising Actor (Paul Kircher). This was only Kircher’s fourth feature film and he is certain to have a promising film career.
Reviews for The Animal Kingdom were predominantly positive with Monica Castillo of RogerEbert.com writing, “The Animal Kingdom” moves swiftly between its characters’ everyday problems and the story’s fantastical elements in a magical realist way that quickly captivates its viewer….The movie is effective in its ability to make us emphasize for the hunted “others” as well as observe how humanity becomes the very thing it fears: monstrous in its attempt to restore law and order. Life is complicated like that, and yet it continues to find a way forward.” And David Ehrlich of Indiewire called it, “A light but meaty piece of magical-realism that threads the needle between Cronenbergian body horror and Miyazaki-like fantasy to create a modern parable that evokes any number of identifiable emergencies — deforestation, the AIDS epidemic, the global migration crisis and its attendant xenophobia, etc. — in the service of a story that refuses to be reduced into a clear metaphor for any one of them.”
Some movie critics took issue with certain aspects of it or had minor reservations such as Peter Bradshow of The Guardian who said, “The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would,” and Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter noted, “a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.” Yes, it might not be a perfect film but it is certainly original and mysterious in ways that stand out from any other contemporary fantasy/horror film out there.
What I don’t understand is why The Animal Kingdom is being distributed on Blu-ray, DVD and on streaming platforms in an English-dubbed version only. Is it a bid to reach a larger audience? I always prefer to hear the original voices of actors in international films with English subtitles provided. Maybe this can be an option on future releases of the film (which is currently available from Magnolia Home Entertainment on Blu-ray and DVD).
Other links of interest:
https://incinemas.sg/mobile/article-details.aspx?id=4159
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/17/romain-duris-france-cinema-interview
Cinema Sojourns 