Animals (2026)

There's a decent Friday-night thriller buried somewhere inside Animals, but Ben Affleck's latest film spends too much time arguing in expensive rooms to ever really find it.

Ben Affleck’s latest directorial feature is a Netflix production that has been pretty much panned by critics across the board. It always feels somewhat haphazard when a streaming service throws money at a film that doesn’t get a cinematic release, and chances are that it does indeed end up being something of a dud. There are exceptions, of course; the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019) and The Power of the Dog (2021) are two examples of major successes in the last decade. Affleck himself has appeared in a Netflix release already this year, Joe Carnahan’s The Rip; a film that was certainly above average, but still not the masterpiece that Quentin Tarantino claimed. But mainly, in my humble opinion, streaming giants throw so much money at films that they're simply not up to snuff.

Animals falls somewhere in the middle. It’s certainly not as terrible as some have suggested, but considering Affleck’s history behind the camera is very solid, it’s not anywhere near as good as one might hope. Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a rich man running for mayor of his home town, Los Angeles. He has funded his own campaign as an independent, non-party-affiliated candidate, and in the process, has leveraged his family’s wealth to supposedly see him through the final stretch of the campaign. Early in the film, we see him leveraging the last of his savings to an outreach effort targeting the Latino American vote, but keeping his wife Abby (Kerry Washington) in the dark about this decision.

It swiftly becomes clear that all is not well in their marriage; we learn Abby is cheating on him, and the pair have even more secrets that come to the fore once the plot really kicks in. On Halloween, he receives a phone call telling him that his son has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are demanding $7 million that Mark simply doesn’t have. But Mark has an ace up his sleeve he didn’t know about- his campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) recommends employing a fixer in the form of Gillian Anderson’s unnamed character. She will also be taking money from Mark for her services.

So everything is in place for an engrossing and enthralling thriller. We know Affleck is capable of this; his debut behind the camera was the superb Gone Baby Gone (2007), and he followed that up with the impressive The Town (2010), before topping it all off with the Oscar winning Argo (2012). Since then, however, his output has dipped. His Dennis Lehane adaptation Live By Night (2016) was admirable in its ambition without ever being better than solid, and Air (2023) was a film that often felt like an advert.

Animals continues the trend of recent mediocrity to an extent. The performances are very good, especially Kerry Washington, who is sublime here, along with Anderson, who relishes every second she’s on screen. But after the initial set-up has been put in place, the film never really fully fires, and although it’s certainly no turkey, it ends up being something of a frustration when you put it alongside other recent L.A crime thriller. It’s hard not to think of Burt Layton’s terrific Don Winslow adaptation earlier this year, Crime 101. While no masterpiece, Layton’s film wore its influences on its sleeve and was a juggernaut of entertainment from start to finish.

Animals aims to thrill in its conversations, but the screenplay never gets beyond stunted rows between the couple, all of which are in a variety of rooms of their huge house. Even though Animals sells itself as an L.A thriller, very little of it is actually set outside the couple’s home. And because the material isn’t up to snuff, we end up in the gap between a feature that isn’t good enough to be a claustrophobic one-location thriller, but also wouldn’t work as a more expansive film.

Still, Affleck is always watchable, and if Netflix’s aim was to offer us a film that passes a couple of hours on a Friday night with a few beers, you could do a whole lot worse. The recommendation would be to do exactly that, but just make sure you’ve got a better film lined up to double bill it with. ★★★ 6.1/10