Ben Affleck knows how to make a thriller. He has already demonstrated that with Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town (2010), and, above all, Argo (2012), when he managed to turn a story whose ending everyone already knew into a suspenseful film that kept audiences on the edge of their seats. That is why watching Animals, his latest Netflix production, is particularly frustrating. It has an impressive cast, an interesting premise, and certainly no shortage of ambition. What it lacks, surprisingly, is almost everything Affleck has already proven he knows how to deliver. The film is excessively dark, confusing in its storytelling, and, perhaps most disappointingly, fails to produce a single truly memorable performance.

The darkness, in fact, is not merely an aesthetic choice. It becomes a problem that compromises the entire viewing experience. There are moments when you practically have to struggle to see what is happening. I understand the intention of creating a sinister atmosphere, especially in a story where characters conceal secrets and must confront their own contradictions. But there is an enormous difference between building tension through light and shadow and simply plunging everything into darkness. The result is exhausting, and instead of increasing suspense, it pushes the audience away.

The story follows Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck), a wealthy lawyer running for mayor of Los Angeles. Married to Abigail (Kerry Washington), father of a young boy, and seemingly enjoying a perfect life, he discovers that his security is far more fragile than he imagined when he receives news that his son has been kidnapped. The criminals demand a multimillion-dollar ransom, and to obtain it, Mark must turn to people and strategies that threaten his reputation, his marriage, and his political ambitions.

It is a classic thriller premise: placing a powerful man in a situation where money, influence, and prestige can no longer protect him. But Animals wants to go further. Its ambition is to explore how far someone is willing to go to protect their family and, more importantly, what happens when morality becomes a matter of convenience. Mark is the kind of character who has carefully constructed his public image, but whose integrity disappears when he must make decisions involving personal sacrifice.

The problem is that Affleck never makes us believe in this man, whether as a politician, a husband, or someone genuinely desperate. His performance seems constantly trapped behind the same worried expression, without allowing fear, guilt, or opportunism to acquire any real depth. And that weakens a story that depends precisely on the moral transformation—or revelation—of its protagonist.

Kerry Washington also struggles to find room to develop Abigail. The actress has more than enough talent to portray intelligent, contradictory, and emotionally complex women, as she demonstrated for years in Scandal. Here, however, her character seems to exist primarily in relation to her husband’s decisions. Even when the screenplay reveals more complicated aspects of their marriage, the relationship lacks intensity. We feel neither intimacy nor complicity, not even a sufficiently convincing conflict to justify their reactions.

And the disappointment does not end with the central couple. Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, and Luis Gerardo Méndez complete a cast that, on paper, should guarantee at least a few outstanding individual scenes. Anderson plays Dayle Burton, a woman capable of offering unconventional solutions to delicate problems, but her presence cannot elevate the film. Yeun, normally excellent at portraying characters who conceal far more than they reveal, also seems limited by the material. It is rare to find so many talented actors in a film without any of them truly standing out. That suggests a problem extending beyond individual performances to the direction itself.

Then there is the screenplay. Animals piles up information, competing interests, and plot twists, but does not always establish a clear connection between events. Confusing the audience is not necessarily a bad thing. Great thrillers depend on incomplete information, false leads, and unexpected discoveries. The problem arises when confusion no longer feels like part of an intelligent construction but rather the result of a narrative that does not know exactly where to focus its attention.

And it is impossible to ignore the similarities to Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), one of cinema’s great explorations of social inequality and moral responsibility. The story of a wealthy man forced to decide how much the life of a child who is not his own is worth has an obvious parallel in Animals. More recently, Spike Lee revisited the premise in Highest 2 Lowest (2025), starring Denzel Washington. Affleck even temporarily halted preparations for his production after discovering the similarities between the projects, and the screenplay underwent significant changes.

But what makes Kurosawa’s classic so extraordinary is not simply the kidnapping or its resolution. It is the way the director uses a seemingly individual situation to question the social and economic structures that determine the value assigned to human lives. In Animals, that discussion is present, especially when the identity of the kidnapped child completely changes the nature of the moral dilemma. Yet the film seems more interested in creating new complications than exploring the human consequences of its own ideas.

Spoilers ahead.

When we discover that Denny, Mark’s son, was never kidnapped and that the real victim is Hector, the son of an immigrant family, we finally encounter the story’s central moral conflict. The man who was prepared to do absolutely anything to save his own son begins calculating the cost of saving someone else’s child. His concern about the political consequences starts competing with whatever impulse toward solidarity he might possess. It is a powerful and extremely timely reversal.

But Affleck does not seem to trust the strength of that revelation. Rather than allowing the dilemma to develop, he accelerates events until the situation becomes a succession of criminal decisions, deaths, and convenient arrangements. Violence takes the place of reflection, while the characters begin behaving according to the needs of the ending.

The real hero is Ramon, Hector’s father, who manages to save the boy. Yet the man publicly celebrated is Mark, who manipulates the story, erases his responsibility, and transforms a tragedy into an electoral opportunity. The politician wins, the marriage survives, and his public image remains intact. The irony is obvious: the man who should lose everything ends up gaining even more power.

It is not an uninteresting conclusion. Quite the opposite. The idea that society rewards those who know how to control the narrative, regardless of their actions, could have sustained a far more incisive political critique. The problem is that the journey toward that conclusion lacks the strength necessary to make it genuinely disturbing. The film explains its thesis but fails to make it resonate emotionally.

Behind the scenes, Animals also faced difficulties. Beyond the screenplay revisions, the production became associated with disagreements between Affleck and Netflix executives. But none of these issues should automatically excuse the final result. Troubled productions have sometimes turned into extraordinary films. What matters, ultimately, is what reaches the screen.

And what reaches the screen is a wasted opportunity. A thriller that should create anxiety rarely manages to generate tension. A drama about moral boundaries fails to establish any meaningful emotional connection with its characters. A story about appearances and lies ends up feeling far too artificial to convince.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Animals is precisely this: a film that sets out to reveal human nature behind social masks ends up offering characters who never seem genuinely human. And coming from a director who has already demonstrated such remarkable skill in telling stories about crime, power, and survival, the disappointment is even greater.