The Animal Kingdom (2023)

The Animal Kingdom arrives from France with twelve César nominations, five wins, and the distinct air of a film that would prefer we not interrogate its premise too closely. A wave of mutations is turning citizens into beasts. The state quarantines them. Families grieve. Thomas Cailley directs with a steady hand and a fondness for mist, forests, and the wounded silences between a father and his teenage son. It is a handsome piece of work, and it knows it.

The creatures here are hunted, tagged, and shuffled into holding facilities, which invites the usual allegorical reading about who gets othered and who gets to decide. The film never names that reading aloud, which is to its credit. There is a faint current of acceptance running beneath the horror, a suggestion that a transformed body remains a body worth loving, though it stays lodged in the register of fantasy drama. Émile's adolescent alienation gestures toward something like neurodivergence without committing to anything concrete. Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a competent police officer, and the film does nothing with that competence beyond letting her stand in the rain. The ensemble is diverse in the unremarkable French manner, meaning nobody remarks upon it. No queer threads, no climate sermon, no economic critique. The antagonist is bureaucracy and fear, which is at least honest.

What we get instead is atmosphere, and atmosphere is not nothing. The film treats its ideas as weather, not argument, which keeps the sermonizing at bay and the emotion intact. Critics called the thematic work superficial. That is a fair charge and, in this case, a mercy.