Director: Thomas Cailley (France, Belgium). Year of Release: 2023
A traffic jam on a major road. A father is driving, his surly teenage son in the passenger seat. They are bickering, when suddenly the lad storms off with his dog and marches down the road through the traffic. His father follows him, then they hear a commotion in an ambulance-type van. After sounds of a struggle, a man breaks out. He has bandages on his face and one of his arms is hidden behind a large wing.. As the man runs off, paramedics from inside the van rush out after him.
Reunited, François and Émile continue their journey to the hospital. Èmile is reluctant. He obviously hasn’t have a good time in hospitals. In the waiting room, they see someone with an animal’s head. They’re there to ask about François’s wife, Émile’s mother, Lana. The doctor reassures them that she’s getting better, the medication is working, and they’re doing everything they can. But, she adds. “These mutations, they’re a recent and complex phenomenon.”
It takes us a while to fully realise what’s going on. A virus has hit France (if not the world) which results in some people mutating into wild animals. Lana is taken to a hospital in the South of France. The official line is that the hospital is better disposed to treating her, although it gradually becomes clear that this is more about segregation than cure. There is a growing movement against the Creatures, which manifests a fair degree of xenophobia.
To maintain contact with Lana, François and Émile move to a village down South. François gets a job as a chef, while Émile starts at a new school. This is where he comes into contact with Nina, a girl with ADHD who cannot stop speaking before she thinks. Nina is awkward, but good at heart. When Nina shouts across the class asking about Èmile’s mother, he tells them that his mother is dead, which is presumably easier than sharing the stigma of being related to a mutant.
In parallel to Èmile’s growing relationship with Nina, François sees increasingly more of Julia, a cop played by the ubiquitous Adèle Exarchopoulos. At first, Julia helps François gain access to Lana, but as the army take increasing control, she is cut out of the decision-making process. Just as with Émile and Nina, it is unclear whether or to what extent François’s relationship with Julia has any romantic dimensions. In the first line, she supports him when he’s feeling isolated.
Things intensify when a van carrying dozens of Creatures crashes, allowing them to escape. Lana is one of the escapees. The authorities cordon off the woods into which the Creatures fled and forbid entry. Nonetheless, François takes Émile on night visits into the forest, trying to make contact with Lana. They drive through the trees, shouting out her name and playing a cheesy song which she used to love loud on the car stereo.
As if he didn’t have enough problems, Émile notices that his finger nails are turning into claws, small humps appear on his spine, and his hearing is becoming increasingly sensitive. In a parody of puberty, hair starts appearing in all the wrong places. It is only a matter of time before he will turn into a Creature. He hides his changed condition from his schoolmates, even from Nina, and from his father, even though François has worked out, and tries to let his son allow him to help.
St Jean’s Day is coming up, and villagers are worrying that the festivities will be called off. This is of particular concern as they have planned a great hunting party in the woods. François’s boss, in particular has been agitating against the Creatures, and wears a t-shirt saying “I like animals, but from afar.” An Aryan looking kid in Èmile’s class is also very hostile, which increases the tension when he starts to suspect that Èmile himself is mutating.
It is not all hostility, though. One of Émile’s schoolmates starts a campaign for living together, and one of François’s co-workers shows extreme sympathy (it later becomes clear that her sister has already mutated into a Creature). In the woods, Émile meets Fix, the birdman from the opening scene. After an initial phase of mutual suspicion, Émile and Fix bond, as the latter loses his human voice but Émile helps him slowly learn how to fly.
There is so much in Animalia that there’s a danger that we spend too much time questioning exactly what it’s supposed to be a metaphor for, rather than letting it all wash over us and accept the film’s own logic. The film works better for me when we believe the story, and even that Julia is a nice and helpful cop. This makes it easier to share François and Émile’s pain as they try to cope with a society which is becoming increasingly hostile to people (and animals) from the outside.
But Animalia is more nuanced than being a simple fairy tale about how prejudice is bad, right, and we should all be a little more tolerant. Yes, it does make these simple and necessary points, but as we follow François and Émile, it shows us that, unfortunately, not everyone is tolerant, and there are those who have to deal with bigotry and exclusion, and cannot wait until the hippies convince everyone to love each other. In this sense, it is a very human drama.
Some storylines raised within the film do not get followed to the end, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Real life doesn’t always end up with all loose threads being tied up. So, we never learn whether François continues to love his mutant wife, or if his head is turned by Julia. The relationship between Émile and Nina reaches a certain point, but then is diverted by Events. The film ends on the prospect of an improvement, but even this is far from certain.
It is partly this vagueness which lifts Animalia above many science fiction films which are only interested in a single concept, but not in the humans behind the story. The film does not waste time explaining details about the virus that we don’t need to know. The emotional centre of the film would work even without the improbable storyline. It would be a different film, for sure, and probably not as good, but the drama is strong enough to hold out on its own.
CinePhil 