The Animal Kingdom

In a world that is hit by a sudden wave of mutations that slowly change humans into animals, a father does everything he can to stay near his infected wife, all while trying to raise their teenage son. But when she and some of the other infected escape into a nearby forest, father and son set out on a quest to find her that will ultimately change all of their lives.

Animal Kingdom begins during a traffic jam.

Francois and his son Emile sits in traffic, as Francois chides Emile in an everyday parent kind of way. Emile seems to be a pretty regular sullen teenager at first, but as their argument grows more heated, it becomes clear that something else sits between them, straining their relationship. Frustrated and angry, Emile, gets out the car and starts to walk away through the standstill traffic. Dad follows, and the two continue to argue there in the road, when a nearby ambulance begins to rock wildly. It suddenly bursts open, and man crashes out the back, flailing about. He’s half bird. With wings and talons. The bird-man fights the paramedics, leaping about the cars, flapping his near-useless wings, and generally causing havoc before he finally escapes. During all this, Francois and Emile scramble to get out of the way, and duck back inside their car, panting. “Strange days…” shrugs a nearby driver, when he meets Francois’ eyes, like all the shit that just happened with the bird guy was just another day.

Because in fact, it was. This is their new normal.

The big problem in The Animal Kingdom is that a virus is going around, and anyone infected begins to mutate into animals. The infected wake up one day to find that they are growing claws, fur, wings, scales, tentacles, tails, “animal” traits in all the colors of the rainbow. At the same time, they start losing their ability to speak and to think rationally, slowly sliding down the evolutionary track as they turn into animals. It’s a scary process, losing touch with their humanity, and so, confused and scared, the infected often end up lashing out violently at their loved ones. Because of the fear, because of the violence, and with no answer as to why this is happening, let alone a cure, society has been struggling to cope with this outbreak.

Finally, the government decides to round up all of the infected, and to keep them behind high walls in these prison-like hospitals, away from the rest of the world, even their loved ones, for fear of the virus, as well as the harm the infected could cause in their animalistic states.

Francois’ wife, Lana, Emile’s mother, is among the infected.

The fact that Francois willing surrendered Lana to the authorities is the thing that sits so angrily between him and his son now. But Lana did attack Emile at one point, and she was getting more and more difficult to control. Francois felt that he had no other options. Emile knows this, but he is still sad and scared and has no place to put his anger but his father. On top of all that stress, Lana is now being transferred to one of the bigger containment sites, so Francois and Emile have uprooted their lives, so that they could move across country, to be closer to Lana, just in case she improves. This means that Emile must now contend with not only with the prospect of slowly losing his mother, as well as his anger with his father, but with fitting in at a new school, in a new town, where he has no friends.

Then, to make matters worse, during a huge storm, the vehicle transporting Lana and some other infected crash, and they all escape into the woods. The locals panic at the thought of infected infesting their forest, so they begin to form hunting parties, while demanding action from local officials, and suspecting everyone that seems “different” of being infected.

Francois and Emile, meanwhile, search the woods for Lana, but to no avail. It is during one of these searches that Emile ends up meeting and making friends with the same bird-man from the beginning of the film, and his quiet companion, a little frog-boy. Emile tries to help them hold on to their humanity as it slips away, all while he continues to try to find his mother, and avoid the army and the locals who are combing the woods for mutants.

Throughout all of this, Emile is hiding the fact that he has begun to mutate too, but due to the kind of typical local teen drama, this is getting harder for him to hide, and the authorities are close to discovering his secret. When Francois finally finds out, he is faced with the fact that he will now lose his son too, and the question looms large of whether or not he will turn Emile over, like he did Lana, or will he let him go off on his own in a dangerous world.

For comic book readers, The Animal Kingdom is a pretty familiar X-men story.

But this is not a story that focuses on the cool and well-known mutants, the glamorous glitterati in their cool outfits with their flashy powers, on their adventures across the globe, as well as space and time, as they fight crazy supervilains and giant robots, this is a story about the ones who can’t hide the fact that they’re mutants from a world that hates and fears them. It’s a story about the mutants who were turned into freaks by the sudden onset of their powers, and how that sudden undeniable change impacts their lives and the lives of their family.

Traditionally, the X-men have been used as a vehicle for a myriad of societal metaphors, from racism, to homophobia, to living with a disability, to the confusing times that can come with puberty, on and on, and the same is pretty much true here for the Animal Kingdom. A mix of metaphors for the inveitable changes in life, for puberty, for growing up, for a child becoming an adult, for a parent struggling with letting go, and for the death of a loved one, as well as the dangers of ignorance and xenophobia, the film is also about the cruel and inhumane way society responds to a health crisis.

From the way people respond in this film to the mutations, you can see the echoes of how HIV/AIDS patients were isolated and abandoned, as well as the way ignorance and denial were used to aggressively block and refute any and all efforts to deal with the spread of COVID-19. The film shows how quickly fear, hatred, and entitlement can be politicized by those in power, by those in the government, or the military, or the cops, and most especially by everyday people too, from the local authority figures, to people like Francois’ boss, to strangers on the street, and even amongst Emile’s classmates too.

Through these animal mutations, this “de-evolution” virus, we see how quickly privileged factions of society will prioritize their own comfort over the health and welfare of anyone they see as beneath them, as anyone they view as being not as important as them, as anyone they think of as an inconvenience.

The film also shows us how willingly monstrous society is capable of becoming whenever they feel frightened and confused, and how quickly and cruelly they will use the weapons of law and order in order to reassure them that they are safe, ultimately revealing who the true monsters really are.

The effects in this film are truly stunning, just amaxing, but in the end, they are only fancy dressing for a window that looks out upon our own world of today.

Ultimately talking about the way people are shunned for being who they are by the dominant forces of a society, Animal Kingdom is very good at getting us to emphasize with the mutants, the “others” who are feared and hated by “normal” people, but…

If I’m being honest, it doesn’t quite stick the landing for me. While I really enjoyed the film thoughout, I feel like it misses a very obvious dangling thread by not having Emile reconnect in some way with his mother.

There’s a moment in the film where this might happen, but it’s too quick and too vague and never confirmed in any way, and maybe you could make the arguement that this is meant as a metaphor for the sudden and irrevocable separation that comes with death, but if that’s what they were going for, it wasn’t done well enough, and even if the resolution of Emile and Francois and Lana wasn’t the main point, the film spends a lot of time on it, so it ends up feeling unresolved.

That made the ending feel like a bit of a sumble for me.

Still, The Animal Kingdom is a really enjoyable film with some frankly incredible makeup and special effects, so it’s worth checking out.