“Animal Kingdom” by Thomas Kaye has been released

At the box office – Thomas Kaye’s dystopia “The Kingdom of the Animals” (Le Regne animal). Having looked at her, Mikhail Trofimenkov I finally figured out what the body horror genre is. This is when the audience feels sick, and the directors explain that this nausea, as in the great novel of the same name by Jean-Paul Sartre, is of an exclusively existential nature.

Seventeen-year-old Emil (Paul Kirscher) grows fangs, nails fall off, arches his spine and grows fur: everything is shown in great detail and, to put it mildly, unappetizing. It’s no wonder that Emil’s classmates look at him somewhat surprised, and his seasoned and unpretentious bearded neighbors from a provincial town are ready to uncover the rifles that are always lurking at the ready in the trunks of their cars and drive the newly-minted little animal through the swamps.

Oh, excuse me, what else can we do with such a miracle of nature? Sending him to the Kunstkamera would result in a cynical mockery of a living being. Issue coupons for enhanced nutrition – but new predators are scared to think about what and who they eat. Look at Emil’s claws. A classmate turned on some strange device that causes a nauseating reaction in mutants (have you read Caillet’s “Inhabited Island” by the Strugatsky brothers, where propaganda “towers” ​​had the same effect on the intelligentsia in a totalitarian society?)—and was hit in the face with his nails.

The bearded Vahlaks do not yet know that Emil’s mother has long been furry and has fangs and therefore is being held in a certain special detention center, to which Emil and his chef father Francois (Romain Duris) moved to the outback to live closer to him. And also monstrous people-grasshoppers are roaming the streets of that same town, and only drunken revelers on stilts think that this is another hallucination. Children-frogs are jumping through the trees. And above the lake, a bird-man named Fix (Tom Mercier) is trying to test his sprouted wings.

In general, something terrible happened. A new epidemic disaster has befallen humanity: homo sapiens suddenly and indiscriminately turn into unknown animals.

In France, with its famous and glorious military-police traditions, something like a curfew is being introduced for mutants. Punitive convoys ply the streets. And only a few dissidents quietly mutter that in Norway mutants are treated much more humanely.

If we speak in an adult way, and not make fun of the ridiculous scenario, then Kaye seriously claims to create a kind of metaphor for modern society. Society is truly in deep disarray, to put it mildly.

But those who are called in the film not even mutants, but “creatures,” must personify someone. And the audience should sympathize with them and hate those who go to shoot kite people or frog people. Otherwise, this is not a metaphor, but some kind of garbage.

So, let’s start with punitive measures against mutants. Is this a reflection of the Covid quarantine? A lot can be said against its specific implementation in many countries, including France, but not to the same extent: health care did not live up to armored operations. And sick people in forests and clearings were not shot from helicopters.

This means that on-screen mutants are some “others” for whom modern civilization has declared a hunt and for whom Kaye, which certainly does him credit, decided to intercede in such a metaphorical form.

You can, of course, ask the director to clarify who exactly he meant by “others,” these ones with claws, tails, fangs and flaky scales. Arabs or Jews, Russians or Ukrainians, who else shoots at whom in the modern world and who else sincerely considers someone a stranger.

No answer. According to Cahier’s humanistic intent, we simply must sympathize with the new inhabitants of the Gascony forests and swamps, because they were once people. But the mistake of the script lies precisely in its humanism. The “creatures” were, yes, people, but, excuse me, they stopped being them. Ciao, bambino, sorry. If you are overgrown with wool and look with interest towards the sheep in the neighboring pasture, you—sorry, mom—are not a mother at all, but a she-wolf.