Affleck’s sixth film as director borrows a classic kidnapping plot and gets a gloriously icy turn from Gillian Anderson, but little else bites.
Ben Affleck the director has a better track record than Ben Affleck the movie star ever got credit for. Gone Baby Gone and The Town were tight, lived-in crime films. Argo won best picture. Air turned a sneaker deal into one of the most purely enjoyable studio movies of the decade. So it is a genuine letdown to report that Animals, his sixth feature as director and his first thriller in a decade, is the least distinctive film he has made. This Animals review finds a movie with all the ingredients of a great Halloween-season potboiler and almost none of the heat.
Affleck stars as Mark Kimball, a Gulf War veteran running as a self-financed independent for mayor of Los Angeles on a platform of rebuilding the city after the 2025 wildfires. Kerry Washington plays his wife Abigail, a therapist who smiles through the campaign photo ops while quietly carrying on an affair with a UCLA lecturer (Ray Fisher). Mark’s campaign manager, Sam (Steven Yeun), is hungrier for the win than the candidate, and he has talked Mark into putting the family’s Westside home on the line to pay for one final ad push.
Then, on Halloween night, a kidnapper calls with a $7 million ransom demand. The twist arrives quickly: the boy who was taken is not the Kimballs’ son but Hector, the son of the man their nanny Cecilia (Adriana Paz) hopes to marry. In the chaos of matching costumes, the kidnapper grabbed the wrong child, and now a wealthy candidate with no cash to spare has to decide what a poor family’s kid is worth to him.
If that setup sounds familiar, it should. The wrong-child kidnapping, the overleveraged rich man and the class tension between employer and staff all come straight from Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, which Spike Lee reimagined only last year as Highest 2 Lowest with Denzel Washington. Animals never acknowledges the debt, and the comparison does it no favors.
Kurosawa and Lee both understood that the story’s power lies in the moral question at its center. Affleck and his co-writers, Connor McIntyre and Billy Ray, spend more time on everything around it.
That is where the film sags. The affair subplot is tepid, and the marital confrontations it triggers are stiff, weighed down by dialogue that sounds written rather than spoken. Affleck and Washington are both skilled performers, but they never convince as a couple with years of history, and their big scenes play like obligations the plot needs to get through.
The political machinery is similarly perfunctory. Mark’s stump-speech promises of honesty and equality are so obviously setups for later betrayals that the film’s cynicism arrives without any sting.
The saving grace is Gillian Anderson. As Dayle Burton, a terrifyingly composed crisis fixer summoned to make the situation disappear, Anderson glides through the film in a white suit with not a hair out of place, calmly reminding her clients that her seven-figure fee is due regardless of the outcome.
Every scene she is in crackles with a wit and menace that the rest of the movie badly needs. It is a supporting performance that feels like it wandered in from a sharper, nastier film, and you wish Affleck had followed her there.
Paz and Luis Gerardo Mendez, as Hector’s terrified father, give the movie its only real emotional weight. Their scenes together are raw and frightened in a way the Kimball household never is, and they underline the story’s class divide more effectively than any line of dialogue. Unfortunately, the script does not trust them with much, and the film’s ending shortchanges their characters in a way that feels careless at best.
Affleck has always been at his strongest as a director when he lets a city shape his story, and there are flashes of that here. Cinematographer Robert Elswit finds some striking textures in the less glamorous corners of Los Angeles, and a climax staged in the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River has a gritty, specific sense of place.
However, the action is cluttered and confusing when it should be clean and tense, and the aftermath stretches credulity to the breaking point. A cameo near the end, meant to land as satire, mostly lands as a shrug. Alison says he learned something from all the filmmaker she ever worked with and if anything this Film seems to represent some of Michael Bays style directing towards the end which is odd considering how vocal Ben Affleck has been about his time working on films like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.
None of this makes Animals unwatchable. The cast is strong, the premise is sturdy enough to hold your attention and the 106-minute runtime moves along. As a Netflix thriller to put on during a quiet weekend in October, it does the job.
But Affleck has proven he can make crime movies with real bite, and Animals rarely bares its teeth.
The title suggests a movie about what people are capable of when the stakes are life and death. The film mostly suggests what a talented director is capable of when he is working on autopilot. Anyone who wants the full force of this story should seek out Kurosawa’s original first.
RATING: ★★★½☆
That’s a Wrap | Animals
A sturdy premise and a gloriously icy Gillian Anderson can’t make Ben Affleck’s borrowed kidnapping thriller bite.
Jonathan P. Moustakas
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CREDITS
Director: Ben Affleck
Screenwriters: Connor McIntyre, Billy Ray, Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Ray Fisher, Christopher Woodley, Matt Gerald, Jacob Estrada, Luis Gerardo Mendez
Cinematography: Robert Elswit
Distributor: Netflix
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes
Release Date: October 9, 2026
