Animale (Fantastic Fest 2024)

When it comes to the combination of body horror and monstrous feminine-centered stories, nobody is doing quite like the French are. With filmmakers like Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducornau currently pushing the genre to bold new places and creating these complex, disturbed heroines, we’re almost in the middle of a French Extremity resurgence. Animale is far from that mode of intensity, yet it’s preoccupied with similar ideas of how women navigate masculine spaces and their capability for violence. 

Set in rural France, this story follows a community of herders who specialise in bull running, a more humane version of bullfighting that is safer for the bulls but still puts the humans in severe danger. Nejma is the first woman to take part in this, a fact her all male colleagues are more than eager to remind her. A night out celebrating after her first show goes a little too hard with the drink and the drugs and Nejma ends up injuring herself while wandering inebriated around the bullpen, something that starts affecting her body and mind in more ways than one. 

It’s difficult to give any more specifics on the film’s plot or themes because Animale is a frustratingly rear-loaded experience. Writer and director Emma Benestan makes the choice to keep our protagonist Nejma, and by extension the audience, in the dark for the most part about the strange goings on that occur around her, leaving a lot of the story’s meat at the very end. This would be fine for the film to build to a wild climax, existing in the realm of folkloric fantasy and body horror but the majority of the film exists convincingly as a European arthouse drama. The problem is that not only is it pretty obvious where the story is going despite how clueless the film paints Nejma, but the drama itself doesn’t know what to do with its characters between the inciting incident and the late stage reveal, leaving the film not just directionless but just plain boring. Nejma’s relationship to her male counterparts is an integral part of this film’s story yet it’s near impossible to differentiate how she feels towards each of them, made all the worse by the fact that they’ve all been cast with identical looking men. The only way I could really identify them was by the frankly excellent shirts they’ve all been costumed with. If Best Costume was awarded based on how much I personally crave their wardrobe then this would be in the running. 

Visually the film has its moments. Shot by Julia Ducornau’s regular cinematographer Ruben Impens, the bull running sequences are stunningly constructed. As far as I can tell these scenes have the real actors themselves interacting with real bulls, strung together with an impressive intensity that marks the film’s high points. Also the film’s main reveal is represented by a cattle branding scene that takes a surreal twist, creating the film’s strongest image that hauntingly exemplifies Benestan’s motives for this story.

Yet the journey we take to get to that powerful reveal is an utterly vacant experience, Animale doesn’t know where to mine the drama to justify its arthouse stylings and at the same time takes so long to get interesting that it seems utterly embarrassed to be a horror fantasy. True, a more genre based film that gets to its louder, more outwardly entertaining ideas earlier would probably be judged as a ‘lower brow’ effort, but when the trade off here is a more self-serious approach that gives us next to nothing to think about for the most part before its conclusion then it seems like a waste of a good premise. The lack of drama completely saps the late revelation of the power it deserves and the genre scenes themselves seem rushed over. This incongruence of story and form is what makes Animale a bitter disappointment, especially when France is currently in the middle of a body horror resurgence it makes the film feel particularly tame (pun intended).

Jake’s Archive – Animale (2024)