Ben Affleck is an accomplished filmmaker with a Best Picture winner (2012’s Argo) to his name. Yet you wouldn’t know it from Animals, a Netflix thriller (Oct. 9) that strives in vain to animate a familiar crime saga about a kidnapping gone awry.
The second remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low in the past fourteen months (following Spike Lee’s 2025 adaptation Highest 2 Lowest), the actor/director’s latest behind-the-camera venture is an unoriginal and suspense-free tale of the haves and the have-nots, told with minimal flair, even less vigor, and almost no interest in its central complications.
Anyone interested in this story has better options—and, one would think, so does Affleck when it comes to available cinematic projects.
Mark Kimball (Affleck) is running as an independent for mayor of Los Angeles, and the de facto campaign video that opens Animals suggests he’s both a charmingly down-to-earth guy and, beneath the surface, a typically calculating politician who knows what appeals to the electorate.
This means he can’t hire Mexican ranch hand Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), the boyfriend of his family’s nanny Ceci (Adriana Paz), because he’s an undocumented immigrant. Nonetheless, he’s desperate to reach the Latino vote, and when he hears that he’s polling behind his opponents, he agrees to his campaign manager Sam’s (Steven Yeun) plan to raise additional money by taking out a loan against his sizeable inheritance.
Mark is married to Abby (Kerry Washington), who responds to his every word and action with thinly veiled disgust and exasperation, and Animals quickly reveals that she’s hiding a secret that, if it comes to light, would threaten their relationship—and his campaign. Thus, the clan is on shaky ground when Mark and Abby’s son Denny (Christopher Woodley) goes out trick-or-treating with Ceci and Ramon’s boy Hector (Jacob Estrada), and shortly thereafter, Mark receives a phone call informing him that Denny has been snatched and the price for his return is $7 million in cash.
Since the kidnapper masks his voice and neither Mark nor Abby can identify anyone who’d have it out for them, they’re stuck in a quandary, made worse by Mark’s now-financially strapped situation: They no longer have the money to make the transaction.
Collaborating with celebrated cinematographer Robert Elswit (whom he previously worked with on The Town), Affleck dramatizes the chaotic moment Mark and Abby learn of Denny’s abduction via a serpentine oner that follows them in and around their well-to-do home, capturing their fear and fury in prolonged real time. Otherwise, though, the director relies on rather unremarkable compositions and multiple mediocre drone shots to generate pulse-pounding energy. Comprised largely of scenes featuring people strategically discussing the logistical and ethical implications of their circumstances, the film demands more visual imagination than it gets.
Consequently, the burden of propping up the proceedings falls to the cast, and in that regard, Animals vacillates between competent and corny. Affleck’s charisma makes Mark simultaneously sincere and potentially untrustworthy, and that tension benefits the film once he’s thrust into a situation with no easy answers.
Far less successful is Washington as Abby, whose sneering high-and-mighty criticisms and judgments mark her as an off-putting hypocrite from the moment go and, as a result, weaken her as a voice of potential compassion and reason. Neither, however, is as unbelievable as Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), the shadowy fixer whom Sam enlists to secure the dough the couple needs to pay the kidnapper, and whose every word is a case study in over-writing.
In a white suit and with a composed, cocky attitude, Dayle holds court with regal imperiousness, telling her clients that the price for her assistance is $1.4 million (on top of what’s borrowed) and that they must attain leverage in these negotiations because “leverage is the balance between the allure of incentive and the consequence of refusal.”
Dayle doesn’t speak like a human but, rather, like a fictional character, hence her later reference to “dyadic pathology” when talking about the kidnappers’ interpersonal dynamics. It’s all very silly, and Anderson’s haughty performance only makes it worse. Given her obvious ruthlessness, it’s no shock when the options she presents to Mark and Abby involve unsavory acts.
Animals has the same twist featured in Kurosawa and Lee’s predecessors, but Netflix has forbidden any pre-release reviews from mentioning it. Still, it’s no spoiler to relay that it challenges Mark and Abby’s morality, torn as they are between altruism and self-interest, and it thrusts the film down spikier avenues. Or rather, that’s what it should do, except that Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, and Affleck’s script doesn’t wrestle with any of the issues it introduces; they’re just window-dressing designed to provide a veneer of depth. That’s most true when it comes to its racial and ethnic elements, which are sketchy and merely add to the pre-existing class-divide frictions.
Too confined to interior spaces to impart a genuine sense of Los Angeles (and its socio-economic schisms), Animals boasts a couple of action-oriented sequences that do nothing for the film’s lethargy, all as Affleck frets and grimaces, Washington weeps and rages, and Yeun stands around suffering abuse for delivering the cold, rational facts.
At no point do any of these individuals seem related, and their eventual confrontations and détentes unfold in an improbable way. None of that, though, is as frustrating as the finale, in which Mark makes ludicrously far-fetched decisions, the best-laid plans predictably fall apart, and contrived developments—and a hilarious bit of heroism—conspire to facilitate a neat-and-tidy conclusion.
Whereas Spike Lee reconfigured his acclaimed source material with operatic flamboyance, Animals simply tweaks it in straightforward, unexciting ways—until it spirals into feel-good fantasy. It’s a do-over without purpose, paying lip service to the pricklier aspects of its central dilemma and then embracing a cynicism that feels even phonier than everything that preceded it.
Affleck’s professional stewardship suggests he’s still capable of getting his directorial career back on track if he finds the right material. This wishy-washy retread, however, isn’t it.
