Animals Review: This chaotic, miscalculated hot mess is a true testament to living out your 20s.
There’s something about the big 3-0 that makes people take stock of the adult life they have been living and think hard about the direction they want their next decade to go in. Endless days of irresponsibility, living large and partying harder suddenly shift to more mature thoughts of getting serious, taking out mortgages and finally settling down. This is the premise of director Sophie Hyde’s freewheeling drama Animals: two hard-partying millennials perilously stumbling towards thirty, one white wine (sometimes two) at a time.
Boozy best girlfriends and flatmates Laura (Holliday Grainger) – a 32-year-old self-doubting writer looking for inspiration – and Tyler (Alia Shawkat)- an acerbic, self-indulgent attention seeker – have faceplanted the curb for the first time in their relationship and landed in different directions. For Laura, she has been mulling over the possibilities of a lifestyle change consisting of marriage and security following her party-girl sister Jean’s revelation of pregnant domesticity and more seriously, after meeting pianist Jim (Fra Free) in the girls’ favourite bar. Meanwhile, Tyler just rolls herself over with a cackle and readies herself to do it all over again.
Despite getting engaged to Jim – much to the dismay of Tyler – following a whirlwind romance, Laura is not quite sure if she’s ready to give up her nightly pleasures of booze, drugs and promiscuity. Feeling replaced by Jim, Tyler wholeheartedly encourages Laura’s hedonistic lifestyle at every turn. This emotional ménage-à-trois is one of the more enjoyable things about the film.
Based on the well-received book of the same name and adapted for the screen by author Emma Jane Unsworth herself, the transition from text to screen falls a little flat and feels lost in translation. Sure, there are moments of hilarious brilliance such as burning bush-gate, “pure porno 84” and the whip-smart one-liners one would expect from Unsworth but overall, the film feels like it’s trying a little too hard causing it to feel more contrived than natural.
With a cracking soundtrack behind them and costumed by designer Renate Henschke’s fantastic metallic thrift store finds, Grainger and Shawkat’s chemistry bursts through this oft-times chaotic, hot mess. Their delivery of unapologetic, Thelma & Louise antics fuelled by an endless supply of drugs and alcohol is spot on and completely believable. They are characters you won’t particularly like…at all and Shawkat plays Tyler like the detestable, jaded revolutionary she purports to be.
My colleague Awais and I were on opposite sides of the curb on this one: he hated it with aplomb as he gawked down at me on the ground with my un-spilled wineglass raised in a toast to pastimes in debauchery-land. I understood the powerful endurance of female friendship and love (both good and bad) that Animals was trying to convey because I have that crazy, accepting love with the girlfriends I have. I can also look back fondly on that chaotic, messy and crazy good time that was my 20s.
Animals is a divisive film that you will either love or hate. Where one person might be disappointed by the writing, plot structure contrived aimlessness and missed the potential of a promising tale, another person might laugh at the failures and piping hot disasters and think…yeah, I made those mistakes too. And sometimes, still do. So, cheers to great times and hot mess moments.
Animals was reviewed at the Sydney Film Festival by Awais Irfan and Sacha Hall, June 2019.
