Animal Kingdom is an Australian film about a dysfunctional crime family. Absolutely joyless, its primary interest is in its formal ambition (more about this later). The film begins with the sounds of chirping birds and a barking dog, the latter of which recurs throughout. Following that, we watch J (a stoic James Frecheville) as he watches TV on the couch next to his dead mother. We don’t at first realize that she’s dead, but the shot holds too long. Then the paramedics show up. She’s OD’ed, and J doesn’t know what to do. He calls up his grandmother, Janine (Jacki Weaver), who turns out to be a too-chipper, empty matriarch overly fond of her sons (kisses on the mouth abound).
That’s about all the setup we get, and it’s all we need. Animal Kingdom picks up where many films leave off: right after the positive or bittersweet resolution of a conflict, when everyone is poised to settle into a pleasant routine (or something). We can imagine the phantom film in which J’s mother struggles to break free from her abusive environment, ultimately succeeding in sheltering her son despite teetering on the verge of heroin-oblivion. Roll credits.
“Crooks always come undone. Always. One way or another,” J intones without affect, a demeanor he obliquely admits is a cover-up for the fear that eats at him the same as it dogs his uncles. His prophecy is also a blueprint. There are no scenes of bank robbery (unless you count the security camera footage during the open credits); there’s no glamor, no glorification, no gold. The onetime “strong creatures,” as Detective Randall Roache (Justin Rosniak) later refers to them in a petty speech on Social Darwinism, are hounded by the Armed Robbery Squad. If you couldn’t guess, the police are no less extralegal than the Cody family.
The corpse count starts early and ends high, and nearly every murder is predictable if not inevitable, as foreshadowed by J. The action rolls downhill like a hellish snowball, but, strangely, decelerates as it progresses. The initially promising and well-paced death-trajectory gets mired in a mess of obscure motives and moral failures. When friend-of-the-family Baz (Joel Edgerton) tells J “Let him know who’s king” after placing a pistol in his hands, it retrospectively comes off as an ironic indictment of every character in the film. But it’s also an indictment of the film’s premise. Why should we spend nearly two hours watching a bunch of people, concerned only with surviving a mortal showdown of their own creation, demonstrate the meanness of their world? Does the answer change if the film decays in parallel with its specimen?
J’s hands are least red, but he’s stupid. As if his family wouldn’t have warned him when he entered their home that Rule #1 is “Never talk to the police,” he answers the detective’s questions despite hearing the legally obligatory preface that he need not. So while he’s not at fault for living in his figuratively burning home, it’s his own damn fault for doing as he’s told regardless of who’s doing the telling. He’s an anti-king until he realizes that the only person he can trust is himself. Not a good conviction for someone to hold outside the fictive environment of urban warfare, an environment that turns out to be nearly as dull as it is repulsive.
