Direction: Dominik Moll
Country: France
Working with his regular collaborator Gilles Marchand on the script, the German-born French director Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry, 2000) adapts Colin Niel’s novel into a film noir that stamps its feet on the snow before jumping up to the Internet cloud. Taking advantage of the serviceable acting of the cast, the intermittently vibrant Only the Animals is in equal parts satisfactory and frustrating, making salty observations on loneliness, infidelity, cyber-scams and power.
The story is told in chapters and takes an elliptical trajectory that, in the end, connects each and every character. It takes us to two contrasting worlds, opposing the snowy, desolated landscapes of the Causses in France to the colorful, populous Abidjan in Ivory Cost.
The plot starts with Alice (Laure Calamy), an unhappily married social worker who is in love with a lonely, morbid farmer tormented by noises, Joseph (Damien Bonnard). Her husband, Michel (Denis Ménochet), gets lured into an Internet sex scheme rooted in West Africa and carried out by Armand (Guy Roger N'Drin), a penniless scammer urgently seeking wealth. Yet, the main link is a missing woman, Evelyne Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the wife of a known financier with projects in Africa. In his absence, and before vanishing without a trace, she embraced a lesbian relationship with a clingy young woman named Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz).
The understated indeterminacy of the story makes us minimally interested, while the surprises, far from jaw-dropping, make it a passable, calibrated crime thriller.
