Animal Kingdom Review

In an understated and blackly comic opening scene, 17 year-old Joshua ‘J’ Cody gormlessly watches a game show while two paramedics try and fail to resuscitate his mother from her latest heroin overdose. Having lied that he’s 18, so as to avoid the horrors of being taken into care, J decides to call his mum’s estranged mother for help.

And that’s when things for J get really, really bad.

It’s hard to believe that Animal Kingdom is writer/director David Michôd’s debut effort.  Assured, restrained and shot through with a uniquely Australian brand of gallows humour, Animal Kingdom looks and feels more like the work of an older, more experienced hand. There is nothing rushed about the way the plot unfolds and the characters, while not exactly fleshed out and well-rounded, are at least plausible and familiar. This is partly because of the obvious similarities between the film’s plot and Melbourne setting, and the real-life events surrounding Melbourne’s notorious Moran family and their associates.

The more time J spends with his uncles and grandmother, the stronger the feeling of impending doom grows.  “Everyone was afraid,” J says in voiceover – and never more than when in the presence of Pope, J’s eldest uncle. As Pope, veteran Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn emanates wrongness from every pore without doing very much at all, and likewise Jacki Weaver, as Smurf, so convincingly inhabits the body of cuddly, if over-doting, matriarch (those lingering, full-on-the-lips kisses are beyond Oedipal) that when she finally unleashes the iron fist in her velvet glove it’s quite the sucker punch.

Despite being stuffed to the gunwhales with great performances and experienced actors (including Guy Pearce, looking lean and peering wearily at the world from behind a fabbo moustache),  Michôd never lets anyone steal the scene from his young protagonist. James Frecheville rewards this faith in spades, with a gut-wrenching and nuanced turn as a boy trying to figure out where in the world the man he is about to become is going to fit.

Even if Michôd’s next film is only 75% as good as Animal Kingdom, it’ll still be pretty bloody good.

Clare Moody

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