The Animal Kingdom French Film Festival

The Animal Kingdom (Le Règne Animal)
(Thomas Cailley, 2023, 128 min, France/Belgium, French w/English subtitles, DCP)

With his long-awaited follow-up to Love at First Fight (2014), Thomas Cailley, who most recently won Best Director at the 29th Lumière Awards in France, envisions a mysterious infection that selectively mutates the bodies of ordinary people into animal hybrids at unpredictable speeds. Nominated for 12 César Awards including Best Director and Best Film, this chilling scenario, conjured with vivid specificity and immediacy via dazzling, impeccably deployed special effects, serves as a relentlessly compelling backdrop to the central performances of Romain Duris (The Three Musketeers), Paul Kircher (the breakout star of Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy), and Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Passages, Planet B). Together, the trio of actors breathe life into this darkly imaginative exploration of a human ecosystem undergoing inexplicable—but potentially liberating—transformation.

“A light but meaty piece of magical-realism that threads the needle between Cronenbergian body horror and Miyazaki-like fantasy to create a modern parable that evokes any number of identifiable emergencies — deforestation, the AIDS epidemic, the global migration crisis and its attendant xenophobia, etc. — in the service of a story that refuses to be reduced into a clear metaphor for any one of them.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire