Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 13, 2026
Full disclosure: I watched Other Mommy back-to-back with Animals, and after the Jessica Chastain flick, I would have welcomed a punch to the face. So there’s probably an element of relativity in my thoughts on Netflix’s latest from Ben and Matt’s Artists Equity studio.
That is to say: I didn’t hate Animals. I also don’t think it’s a good movie. There’s a loftier film buried in there, one that could have wrestled more seriously with the ethics of its premise, but Affleck either took a shortcut to the conclusion or left a lot of conversations on the cutting room floor. Animals could have been The Town, maybe, but The Town wasn’t made for Netflix. Animals was, and a Netflix movie is far more interested in twists and a tacked-on epilogue than in the moral complexity this one was capable of.
But I like Ben Affleck. I like Steven Yeun, and Gillian Anderson, and Kerry Washington (though I do not like Kerry Washington with Ben Affleck), so I was mostly entertained by Animals, even as I felt befuddled and a little disappointed by what it could have been.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent running for mayor of Los Angeles. He’s blown through his savings to fund the campaign, but he hasn’t told his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), who is having an affair with a guy named Ron (Ray Fisher), who gets all of one scene. That’s the setup.
The complication arrives when Mark gets a phone call: His young son, out trick-or-treating on Halloween, has been kidnapped. Mark has until midnight to come up with $7 million, or the kidnapper will kill the boy. Mark doesn’t have $7 million because he spent it all on his campaign, but he and Abigail are desperate enough to call in Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), a fixer who quietly makes problems like these disappear for important people. For a fee, of course.
Kimball’s money problems would evaporate if he could win the mayor’s race; two or three fundraisers and his debts are gone. The trouble is, he’s down a few points with Latino voters. So he and Abigail are freaking the hell out about their kidnapped son — and then their son walks through the front door, safe and unharmed.
Turns out, the kidnappers grabbed the wrong kid. They took Hector, the son of the Kimballs’ nanny’s boyfriend, Ramon, who is undocumented. This is where Animals briefly turns into Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low (or Denzel’s Highest 2 Lowest). Mark would have paid $7 million to free his own son. Will he pay $7 million to free the son of his nanny’s undocumented boyfriend?
Had the movie stayed in that sandbox longer, it would have been a much better film — though it also would have been a blatant High and Low rip-off. Instead, Mark sees the situation as an opportunity, and the film ends in the most cynical way imaginable.
I probably would have been OK with that if Affleck the director had laid the groundwork for it. But rather than dig into the complexities of the premise, or even bother to figure out who the kidnappers are (they remain essentially NPCs), Animals just solves everything with a shootout.
Fine. That’s not what we expect from a Ben Affleck-directed movie, but it is what we expect from a Netflix movie, so maybe that’s on us for expecting more. It’s not The Town or Argo or Gone Baby Gone. It’s a streaming movie Artists Equity made not to win awards but to eke out a profit, and I’m sure it will succeed on that front. But it is decidedly not a thinking person’s Netflix movie. It’s just a Netflix movie. Affleck goes a little over the top; he and Kerry Washington have the chemistry of dish soap and water; everything wraps up too neatly; the credits roll; and Netflix collects its views. The movie is as nakedly cynical as the streaming industry that made it.
