 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Animals • Year: 2017 • Country: Switzerland, Austria, Poland • Director: Greg Zglinski • Main cast: Birgit Minichmayr, Philipp Hochmair, Mona Petri • Runtime: 95 minutes • Production company: Tellfilm, Coop99 Filmproduktion, Opus Film • TRAILER |
A marriage in crisis composed by Nick, a culinary chef, and Anna, a writer of children’s books, decides to give itself a second chance by moving for a long vacation kind of period, to a house in Switzerland. With this break from their regular lives, Anna plans to write a first novel (and to separate his husband from the probable unfaithful stories he’s conducting) while Nick looks for enlarging his list of recipes with regional dishes and meetings with other chefs (and maybe to get a bit of air from his secret stories too).
But the film is not as simple as it seems: far away from being a conventional dramatic romance, surrealism stains the narrative and makes it darker and troubling embarrassment, sometimes with a dark sense of humor, sometimes with a twist in the events. Things are not fully explained, yet you let yourself get carried into that labyrinth of strangely similar characters, of feelings that can drown you, of parallelisms between fiction and reality, and of animalistic instincts and metaphors…?
Sometimes reminding the cinema of Hitchcock, sometimes the one from Lynch, this suspense story of aversion and ex-lovers, with -not to forget- speaking animals, develops a disturbing feeling in the spectator.
Apparently, the original writer Jorge Kalt wrote the script a decade ago, with the intention of directing it too, but committed suicide shortly after. The project was recuperated by director Greg Zglinski, a former pupil of Kieslowski (author of the widely known Trilogy of Colors, Three Colors: Red (1994), Three Colors: White (1994) and Three Colors: Blue (1993)), and has successfully managed to accomplish it. After having watched Animals, I’m certainly expecting to see what will come next.
RATE: 6/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6510634
