A woman goes missing in a small French community. The question of what happened to her is the central mystery around which this tale is woven. Along the way, we get a glimpse into the private lives - and secrets - of half a dozen of the community's inhabitants or associates.
The structure of the film has been compared to the classic Kurosawa film Rashomon, in that both tell their story through the perspective of several different characters. In Rashomon, however, essentially the same events are related through different eyes. In Only the Animals, each character experiences only part of the action, so that by the end, the viewer alone is in possession of the whole story.
This latter approach is quite innovative - certainly, it's not a narrative method that I can recall having previously encountered - and it works very well in maintaining interest. The downside is that by switching periodically between different characters, one ends up not developing much of an emotional attachment to any of them. This is in spite of the fact that they all have in common a potentially sympathetic motive - a desire to escape loneliness. The methods by which they try, however, tend to only create more problems, either for themselves or others.
The film includes a supernatural element that, presented with a little more ambiguity, could have substantially enhanced the creep factor. Rather than opting for more thrills, however, the director keeps faith with the movie's generally bleak outlook by implying an only-too-human intelligence at work.
As an aside, some reviewers have criticized the film's action as lacking credibility because of an alleged overreliance on coincidence. I think this is a misreading. The narrative structure of presenting the story from various points of view creates an *illusion* of multiple coincidences, but I think if it had been told in a more conventional manner, that impression would not arise. Indeed, I can recall only two genuine coincidences throughout, and the second is a minor one that occurs at the very end and is hardly necessary to the wider plot.
Perhaps the movie's weakest moment comes when we finally discover what happened to the missing woman. It's a very brief, unpersuasive and anticlimactic scene, indicating that perhaps action sequences are not the director's forte. Minor criticisms aside though, I would describe this as a thoughtful, innovative and well-crafted film - more a work of art than mere entertainment, though still accessible enough to have broad appeal. It surely deserved a wider audience than the one it apparently got outside its home country.
The structure of the film has been compared to the classic Kurosawa film Rashomon, in that both tell their story through the perspective of several different characters. In Rashomon, however, essentially the same events are related through different eyes. In Only the Animals, each character experiences only part of the action, so that by the end, the viewer alone is in possession of the whole story.
This latter approach is quite innovative - certainly, it's not a narrative method that I can recall having previously encountered - and it works very well in maintaining interest. The downside is that by switching periodically between different characters, one ends up not developing much of an emotional attachment to any of them. This is in spite of the fact that they all have in common a potentially sympathetic motive - a desire to escape loneliness. The methods by which they try, however, tend to only create more problems, either for themselves or others.
The film includes a supernatural element that, presented with a little more ambiguity, could have substantially enhanced the creep factor. Rather than opting for more thrills, however, the director keeps faith with the movie's generally bleak outlook by implying an only-too-human intelligence at work.
As an aside, some reviewers have criticized the film's action as lacking credibility because of an alleged overreliance on coincidence. I think this is a misreading. The narrative structure of presenting the story from various points of view creates an *illusion* of multiple coincidences, but I think if it had been told in a more conventional manner, that impression would not arise. Indeed, I can recall only two genuine coincidences throughout, and the second is a minor one that occurs at the very end and is hardly necessary to the wider plot.
Perhaps the movie's weakest moment comes when we finally discover what happened to the missing woman. It's a very brief, unpersuasive and anticlimactic scene, indicating that perhaps action sequences are not the director's forte. Minor criticisms aside though, I would describe this as a thoughtful, innovative and well-crafted film - more a work of art than mere entertainment, though still accessible enough to have broad appeal. It surely deserved a wider audience than the one it apparently got outside its home country.