‘The Animal Kingdom’: Cannes Review

Dir. Thomas Cailley. France. 2023. 130mins

Back in 2014, French writer-director Thomas Cailley ended his debut feature, offbeat anti-romcom Love at First Fight (Les Combattants), on a curious apocalyptic note. That’s where he picks things up with long-awaited follow-up The Animal Kingdom, a bold, altogether wild-up genre mash-up. Inspired by an original script by co-writer Pauline Munier, this is a father-son story set against a nightmare background of human-to-animal mutations, with an ominous end-of-days feel and a decided streak of Cronenbergian body horror – yet at the same time, a distinctive emotional warmth in the story of its teenage protagonist.

Sets itself up as a brooding chiller, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender

Rippling with visual invention, this Un Certain Regard opening title almost has too many ideas to be easily contained in its running length; but it has all it takes to cross over beyond its domestic market and score with genre fans, followers of outré auteur invention and teens-to-20s audiences alike. It also provides a significant boost in visibility both for director Cailley and his young star Paul Kircher, the revelation of Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy (2022).

At some time, seemingly in the near future, a mysterious condition is causing people to mutate into animals – like the creature seen making an explosive appearance in the opening sequence. Another casualty is a woman named Lara, wife to chef François (Romain Duris) and mother to teenage Emile (Kircher). The pair relocate to the south of France to be nearer Lara, currently interned in a holding faculty for ‘critters’ – as unsympathetic, fearful humans call them. François takes a job at a local eaterie, while Emile settles into a new school, where he forms a promising connection with classmate Nina (Billie Blain).

When a group of animal-human hybrids escape, François is determined to comb the local forest in search of his errant wife. Meanwhile, Emile notices that his hearing is becoming more acute, and his fingernails a little sharper… As François teams up with sympathetic gendarme Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Emile finds himself increasingly drawn to the strange new breed that are now his neighbours – in particular, bonding with birdman Fix (Tom Mercier, from 2019 Berlinale winner Synonyms).

Much of The Animal Kingdom (not to be confused with the similarly-named 2010 Australian drama) might seem familiar: hybrid creatures in the Island of Dr Moreau tradition, icky bodily transformations as in The Fly, even hints of X-Men-style superhero imagery. What’s remarkable, though, is how cannily the film weaves its tropes together, and on what an ambitious scale. Even though it adheres mainly to a single locale, a provincial town surrounded by lush forests – it was shot in the south-western Gascony region – the staging of the action and the richly observed landscape photography by David Cailley (the director’s brother) convey an increasingly cosmic sense of a natural world rewriting its rules in the face of human incomprehension. 

The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender. Notwithstanding occasional grotesque effects, the creature design, VFX and make-up departments jointly create visions of surreal beauty – not least in such simple images as a recognisably human gaze peering out from behind the scales of a person-size pangolin. Sound and FX work are impeccable all round, with a degree of perfectionism that shows the film going several notches beyond the usual standard for French genre product.

Narratively, there are provocative themes at work here: the idea of nature reprogramming itself in the era of climate catastrophe, the suggestion that we may have to ready ourselves for a post-human order, as well as the familiar science-fiction trope of critter haters as virulent racists.

Duris takes something of a backseat, but is forceful as the faintly bohemian family man trying to confront unthinkable crisis, while Exarchopoulos is by turns warm, brittle and punchy, if somewhat underused. A prosthetically transformed Mercier gives a startling, athletic performance as ornithologically-enhanced fugitive Fix, although his sequences are awkwardly out of keeping with the rest – at times perilously close to a starry-eyed Disneyfied take on superhero action. Kircher, however, pretty much owns the film as a candid, sometimes gauche, ultimately tormented embodiment of teenage vulnerability, with Emile’s fears and joys calibrated to terrifically sharp effect by a young actor whose stock is destined to soar.