TL;DR: Animals is Ben Affleck’s sharp, cynical Netflix kidnapping thriller that turns genre formula into a brutal moral test, powered by strong performances and an Anderson scene-stealer.

 

Ben Affleck the director has always been more interesting to me than Ben Affleck the movie star, and Animals is a reminder of why. His first feature, Gone Baby Gone, was a missing-child story that ended on a moral choice still worth arguing about two decades later. Animals, now in select theaters and streaming on Netflix, returns to that territory with a bigger budget, a political backdrop and a cast that looks assembled to win prestige-TV bingo. Affleck directs and stars, and the result is a sharp, often uncomfortable kidnapping thriller that cares far more about the people paying the ransom than about the person collecting it. This is not a perfect movie, and its first act leans on familiar genre beats. But once it shows its hand, it becomes something meaner and much more memorable.

Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a wealthy businessman running as an independent for mayor of Los Angeles. On paper he is almost suspiciously perfect: an Army veteran with progressive views, a fluent Spanish speaker, self-funded, married to a Black therapist named Abigail (Kerry Washington), and father to a mixed-race son, Denny (Christopher Woodley). The film is aware that Mark reads like a strategist’s character-creation screen maxed out on every stat, and that self-awareness gives it a dry edge from the start. A few days before the election, on Halloween, Denny is kidnapped and the caller wants $7 million. The catch is that the Kimballs don’t have it in cash, because Mark has poured their fortune into a campaign he might still lose.

Animals’ kidnapping plot starts familiar, then flips the board

For the first stretch, Animals plays the classic ransom-thriller hits: anxious phone calls, paranoia about who can be trusted, and the slow realisation that money and power don’t buy control. It’s competently done and tense, but I spent that opening act thinking I’d seen this movie before, and I suspect genre veterans will feel the same. Then comes the twist, and I’m not going anywhere near the specifics. What matters is that it doesn’t just change the plot, it changes the question the movie is asking. Instead of “will they get Denny back?” the film starts interrogating what Mark and Abigail are willing to become, and what they’ve been hiding from each other all along.

That pivot reminded me less of other kidnapping films and more of Heavy Rain, where the real horror was never the villain but how far a desperate parent would go when every option is bad. Animals keeps putting its characters in no-win scenarios and quietly turning the question on the audience, like a Telltale game where the choice prompt never comes and you’re left judging yourself anyway. It works because the movie refuses to offer a clean exit. Some viewers will find that bleakness exhausting rather than exciting, and that’s fair. If you want a cathartic thriller where the good guys win and everyone hugs, this isn’t it.

Gillian Anderson steals the show as a fixer with zero illusions

Desperate for cash, Mark and Abigail follow campaign manager Sam’s (Steven Yeun) suggestion to bring in Dayle Burton, a mysterious fixer played by Gillian Anderson. Dayle can get the ransom money, for a price, naturally, and she also takes it upon herself to educate the Kimballs on how kidnapping negotiations really work. Anderson plays her as utterly unsentimental, a professional who has seen enough human behaviour to have no patience for anyone’s moral self-image. She’s the movie’s thesis statement in a sharp suit, and every scene she’s in tightens the screws. It’s a performance that feels like the coldest possible evolution of the no-nonsense energy she’s been honing since The X-Files.

Yeun is solid as the campaign brain, though the film gives him less room than I wanted, especially given how good he is at playing quiet, simmering pressure. It’s the kind of supporting cast where you occasionally wish the script had one more scene for each of them. Still, the ensemble never feels decorative. Everyone around the Kimballs functions as a mirror, reflecting back a version of the choices they’re refusing to admit they’re making.

Affleck and Kerry Washington sell a marriage already cracking

The emotional core of this Animals review comes down to the central couple, and Affleck and Washington deliver. Neither Mark nor Abigail is a hero. Mark has hidden how much of their savings he has burned on his campaign, and Abigail, as the trailer already revealed, is having an affair. Both can be selfish and hypocritical, and the film lets them be unlikeable without turning them into cartoons. The kidnapping forces conversations they’ve clearly been avoiding for years, and the actors play those confrontations with the raw, exhausted bitterness of people who know exactly where to aim.

Affleck is particularly good at Mark’s polished public exterior slowly giving way to something more panicked and calculating. Washington matches him, giving Abigail a sharp intelligence that makes her harder to dismiss than the “cheating wife” label might suggest. Their chemistry isn’t romantic so much as combative, and that’s exactly what the story needs. As a director, Affleck keeps the camera close and the focus on faces rather than set pieces, which is the right call for a thriller this interested in flawed humanity.

A post-fire Los Angeles that becomes all of America

Animals is set in Los Angeles after the 2025 wildfires, and the lingering anger at the political establishment hangs over everything. The film is interested in who recovered and who didn’t, using the city’s economic and cultural layers to stage a broader argument about rich and poor, and about citizens and undocumented immigrants. Releasing it while LA is in the middle of a real, heated mayoral race is either canny timing or a very loud coincidence, and it makes the political material land harder. The social commentary isn’t subtle, but it’s woven into the stakes rather than delivered as a lecture.

Where some viewers may bristle is the film’s cynicism. Its view of human nature, and of what winning actually costs, is bleak. I found that conviction refreshing in a genre that usually flinches, but I can see audiences finding it heavy-handed or relentlessly grim by the final stretch.

Verdict

Animals is a tense, thoughtful Netflix thriller that starts as a fairly standard kidnapping movie and becomes something far more provocative after its mid-film twist. Affleck directs with confidence and restraint, Washington and Affleck make a fractured marriage feel painfully real, and Gillian Anderson is magnetic as a fixer who knows exactly what people are. The opening act leans on formula, some of the supporting cast deserved more to do, and the relentless cynicism won’t suit everyone. If you love morally knotty thrillers like Gone Baby Gone or games that punish you with impossible choices, this is an easy recommendation. If you want a comforting rescue story, look elsewhere.