Oh, the tangled webs we weave. Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) explores these sticky and often fraught webs in his latest film Only the Animals. The slow-burn whodunit is told in four distinct storylines that focus on various characters involved in the mysterious disappearance of a middle-aged woman, Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi).
The movie starts off in the remote Causse Méjean region of France, where Evelyne’s abandoned van is found parked on the side of a wintery road. There’s an obvious Fargo vibe, but Moll quickly leaves the frigid landscape behind in order to chase after a story that’s more concerned with humanity’s strange and often ironic interconnectedness than it is with the missing woman.
The characters at play here are married couple Alice and Michel Firange (Laura Calamy and Denis Ménochet), Evelyne Doucat and her secret lover Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the strange loner Joseph Bonnefille (Damien Bonnard) and Armand (Guy Roger “Bibisse” N’Drin), a young scammer living in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
The mystery of Evelyne’s disappearance unfolds in pieces. We learn that both Alice and Michel are guilty of infidelity, and Evelyne herself lives a lonely life in a quiet country mansion with a wealthy husband who is rarely ever home. When Armand, known to his friends as “Rolex,” makes a deal with local gangster Papa Sanou (Christian Ezan), who dabbles in magic and matters of fate, he unknowingly sets off a chain of events that eventually leads to Evelyne’s demise. Papa Sanou warns him that “chance is greater than you,” but Armand foolishly doesn’t listen to this advice, too concerned with making quick cash by catfishing Michel into believing he is a beautiful woman named Amandine. This small act of infidelity at the hands of Michel is enough to connect him to Marion, Evelyne’s lover, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the woman in the pictures Armand has been sending to Michel—which leads to unforeseen disaster. These characters are less than likeable, but their frailty and desperation for intimacy make them reasonably sympathetic character studies.
The central mystery of Only the Animals is not complex enough to be all that compelling. It’s almost as if the movie rejects the classic mystery device of “red herrings” in order to be as direct as possible about how all of these individuals are connected. While this choice can be interesting at times, it also leaves the film lacking in intrigue and suspense. This is not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, so if you sit down expecting something fast paced with a lot of twists and turns, you’d best recalibrate your expectations now. Instead, Moll is more interested in that invisible thread tying each and every one of us together, a thread so fragile that all it takes is one good secret to end up unraveling the whole.
Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group
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