A deer caught in the headlights is the perfect metaphor for Animals. Facing danger in the middle of the road, it freezes, unable to decide which way to go. For a moment, it seems almost willing to get run over rather than make a move. Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort has the same problem. Its characters find themselves in increasingly desperate situations, but the film seems just as lost, jumping between a kidnapping thriller, a marriage drama, and political satire without figuring out how to make these elements work together. The result is a frustrating, uneven film that falls short of Affleck’s best work, particularly Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Argo.
At the center of the story is Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck), a progressive mayoral candidate who has built his public image around honesty and integrity. When his family is threatened, those principles become much harder to maintain. The interesting question isn’t whether Mark is a hypocrite. It’s whether he ever truly believed in the values he preached, or whether he simply never had to sacrifice anything important for them. It’s easy to talk about doing the right thing when the consequences fall on someone else. It’s considerably harder when your own family is on the line.
One of the film’s most obvious shortcomings is its treatment of women. Abby, Cecilia, and Dayle Burton may occupy very different positions in Mark’s life, yet they all end up feeling like convenient pieces in his personal puzzle. They are there to complicate his choices, expose his weaknesses, or help him find a way through the mess he has created. The problem isn’t simply that the women have limited screen time or imperfect characterization. It’s that the film rarely seems interested in who they are when Mark isn’t the one at the center of the story.
Abby (Kerry Washington), Mark’s wife and a psychiatrist, should have been a far more interesting character. She has a demanding career, a troubled marriage, and frustrations that eventually turn into infidelity. There’s plenty to explore there. Why has the relationship deteriorated? What has she been missing? What does she want beyond her marriage? The film does little to explore these questions. Her dissatisfaction becomes another complication in Mark’s already crowded life. Even her professional identity feels like an afterthought. She may be a psychiatrist, but the film gives us little sense of how she thinks, what she believes, or how her work shapes her view of the world. She remains defined primarily by her role as Mark’s wife.
Cecilia (Adriana Paz), the family’s Latina immigrant nanny, is treated differently, but the result is just as frustrating. She cares for the family’s son while navigating the insecurity that comes with being an immigrant worker dependent on her employers. When she asks Mark and Abby to help her undocumented boyfriend, Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez), the film briefly shows us the distance between their comfortable lives and hers. That distance becomes impossible to ignore when Ramon’s son, Hector, is abducted after being mistaken for Mark’s child because the boys are wearing identical costumes. Despite this interesting premise, Cecilia and Hector are just there to force Mark into a moral reckoning. We see their suffering, but the film is much more interested in what it reveals about Mark than in what this crisis means for them. Cecilia is the person whose family is in danger, yet Mark remains the character whose moral struggle receives the most attention.
Then there’s Dayle Burton, played by the absolutely fabulous Gillian Anderson, who is the film’s most intriguing character. A shadowy fixer dressed in a stark white suit, she appears almost out of nowhere in her car, just when everyone else seems unable to figure out what to do. She takes control of the situation and guides the characters through the crisis, becoming something of a knight in shining armor. Her arrival is one of the film’s more peculiar conveniences. She feels like someone the screenplay summons when it needs a solution. And her help certainly isn’t free. Dayle demands the deed to the Kimballs’ home as a down payment on her fee, turning rescue into another business transaction. Although Dayle has more authority and independence than Abby or Cecilia, that doesn’t necessarily make her a more fully realized character. She falls into a familiar role: the capable woman who appears to help a man get through a crisis. She is in charge, but we learn almost nothing about her life beyond the job she performs for Mark. Even her independence serves the story of a man in trouble.
This is what makes the film’s treatment of women so disappointing. Abby is the wife whose unhappiness complicates Mark’s public life. Cecilia is the vulnerable worker whose suffering forces him to confront his own privilege. Dayle is the fixer who arrives to help him navigate a crisis. Three different women, three different circumstances, but all three exist to move Mark’s story forward. The irony here is hard to miss. Animals wants us to question a world in which powerful people treat others as expendable, yet it treats its own female characters in the same way. The film criticizes the tendency to see other people as tools, but it doesn’t pause to consider its own treatment of women.
Animals has something worth saying about political hypocrisy, class, and the way people justify their worst decisions when their own interests are threatened. But its scattered storytelling prevents those ideas from developing as fully as they should, while its female characters remain frustratingly tied to the needs of its male protagonist. Like the deer in the opening metaphor, the film seems to know there’s danger ahead but, blinded by headlights, cannot decide what to do about it.
