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Only the Animals review – audacious web of love and strangeness | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

Dominik Moll’s thriller charts an unhappily married woman’s terrifying fate and her mysterious connections to five other people

Twenty years ago, director Dominik Moll made a splash at Cannes with his black-comic psychological shocker Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien, starring the incomparably disturbing Sergi López – a film with the kind of delicious cruelty and sophistication that somehow only the French can produce. Its title over here was inelegantly rendered Harry, He’s Here to Help, although I made a doomed attempt to popularise my own version: Harry Wants to Be Your Friend. After that, Moll had a number of credits, but nothing to live up to that picture, which promised us a film-maker with the style of Claude Chabrol.

But now Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre – adapted by Moll and his longtime collaborator Gilles Marchand from the novel, Seules Les Bêtes by Colin Niel. It is about five people and their relationship with a sixth person who is to meet a terrifying, arbitrary fate. The movie introduces us in turn to these six overlapping lives, with ingenious point-of-view shifts that will explain an apparent oddity or anomaly in the previous scene and set us up for a rug-pull in the next, letting us in on a secret, then coolly pushing us away.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2M9GQ9e
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