ANIMAL: A Review

A film about a man's daddy-issues-driven descent into absolute madness, which would have benefited greatly from better writing and much better execution.

The stir it created in the media and the excessive public discourse about it was one of my only reasons for finishing the movie (it actually, literally took me 5 days). It's a 3 and a half hour movie that took way too long to get to the point and took way too many useless detours along the way.

Starting with the laughably terrible writing. I'm not even talking about the misogynistic undertones, just about the sheer ridiculous dialogues. For the first half, I just kept wondering why I was watching it at all (and kept side-eyeing my mother, who was clearly just as disgusted as me and could barely tolerate the film). On top of that, the storytelling was messy and I couldn't make proper sense of it till perhaps the first hour was over. I felt no real inclination to continue.

The film needs no introduction to its own sexist bits which we've all seen all around the internet. But other than that, a lot of the movie just... made no sense. Like you're just raising your eyebrows and twisting up your fingers in utter confusion.

Of course, the movie perpetuated this idea of extremely toxic masculinity and was, without doubt, written to appeal to men. It took the traditional masculine role and, perhaps, the urge of being a 'protector', twisted it around and made it fatal, gruesome, brutal, and villainous. The 'alpha' ideology, which you'd believe is long-gone, makes a bloody return in Animal. It tried to appeal to these primal, violent instincts that we, as a society, hopefully never want to go back to. But I don't think I can complain about that, because it seemed to be the director's vision, and he made it abundantly clear. In any case, that's what the movie was all about.

And anyway, one of the most satisfying scenes throughout the movie was when the protagonist's wife begins to scream at him and slap him and demand a divorce, which I think already says a lot about the film.

That said, the action scenes, the violent, bloody scenes, the final showdown fight - all of that was good. Perhaps for the sole reason that that was what I expected the movie to be - and what I had maybe hoped it would be. Because these scenes are your glorious, much-needed break from the utter rubbish dialogues.

The crux of the movie, however, was the father-son relationship - it was literally the flesh of the plot, the very bloody, vulnerable base of this violent character. But for a movie which was so much about his daddy issues, it didn't actually talk about it a lot at all. For so much of the movie, you just don't understand WHY he's so damn obsessed with his father. Because it doesn't provide any reasonable justification, it just comes off as an amusing, irrational obsession.

The redemption of the movie, then, for this specific arc, comes at the end. One of the final scenes, where he finally goes to his father after all of it is done and they reverse their roles, where you can see him crying and screaming (what brilliant acting), where you can see the very heart of the characters and finally, the very root of the movie - that scene was IT. That's what you realize you were waiting for all throughout the film, what it was really all about, and what it failed to deliver well enough.

Other than that, the performances are great and it has a banger soundtrack, though the songs felt a bit oddly placed in the film.

But the truth is that I just really had to struggle (for more than 3 hours, mind you), to look for the two scenes that I sort of liked. 

All in all, Animal was a bad movie, for me, not just because it was toxic and misogynistic (that's a sour, bitter cherry on top) but because it honestly just wasn't done well - from the writing to the storytelling.