Ramon can be trusted to take the Kimballs’ son trick-or-treating, although giving him a job would apparently endanger the household’s principles. When Cecilia, their Mexican nanny, asks her employers to hire her undocumented partner, Abigail invokes her husband’s respect for the law and the risk to his mayoral campaign.
The childcare arrangement proceeds without comparable anxiety. These adjacent decisions give Ben Affleck’s Animals its sharpest political observation: the family’s concern about Ramon’s status becomes decisive when helping him would carry a public cost. Privately, his usefulness remains welcome.
Mark Kimball’s campaign advertisement offers a carefully assembled image of inclusive leadership, while his campaign manager worries about weak support among Latino voters. Inside the house, inclusion has already acquired conditions.
The couple’s affectionate treatment of Cecilia as family accommodates a refusal to help the person she loves. Affleck, directing and playing Mark, places this discrepancy beside another awkward fact: the candidate has borrowed against his affluent Los Angeles home to finance his campaign. His public future depends on money already committed, making electoral defeat a threat to the comfortable life from which he promises service.
The kidnapping call turns that financial exposure into immediate terror. A disguised voice claims to have taken Mark and Abigail’s son, Denny, and demands $7 million they cannot readily produce. Affleck is effective as a man whose practiced confidence begins to buckle.
The appealing public manner survives as an increasingly strained habit, recognizable even when panic makes it useless. Then the film changes the identity of the victim: the abducted child is Ramon’s son. The revelation’s value lies in the decision it creates. With Denny safe, the Kimballs must establish how much another family’s child can demand of them.
Sam, played by Steven Yeun, supplies an answer through campaign arithmetic. Helping could improve Mark’s standing with the community. His calculation is ugly precisely because it preserves an incentive to do something good; the child’s rescue could become a saleable demonstration of the candidate’s generosity.
This gives the thriller a sharper question than the familiar discovery that politicians possess flexible convictions. Mark has advisers, property, and access to private assistance. Ramon’s family needs those resources, and the people controlling them can decide how its distress will be interpreted. Sam starts composing the public meaning before the danger has passed.
Yet Cecilia and Ramon receive little room to contest that meaning. Adriana Paz’s Cecilia has a concrete wish before the kidnapping: employment for her partner. Luis Gerardo Méndez’s Ramon then becomes the parent whose endangered child tests Mark’s obligations.
These are potent dramatic positions, but the film spends much of its subsequent energy on the Kimballs’ deliberations and grievances. The difficulty is the limited development of the demands already present in these characters. Cecilia’s request and Ramon’s parental terror establish lives that exceed Mark’s predicament, while the screenplay repeatedly draws them back into his moral examination.
Gillian Anderson’s Dayle Burton arrives to put prices on the available responses. Brought in by Sam, the fixer can arrange access to the ransom money, requires a substantial upfront fee, and offers darker services at further cost. Her immaculate white suit and controlled delivery introduce an entertaining chill into the household’s agitation.
Anderson makes calm itself feel expensive. Dayle’s fees give the political argument a practical form: people with the right contacts can purchase options unavailable to those whose child has been taken. Her composure offers temporary relief from the surrounding panic, even as her proposals make the situation uglier.
Dayle’s authority, however, rests heavily on her entrance, her manner, and the services she advertises. The writing gives Anderson relatively little consequential problem-solving to perform. Meanwhile, the kidnapper’s electronically altered calls keep interrupting an overnight succession of discussions and marital confrontations.
The calls renew the deadline’s pressure, but the conversations too often revisit positions without making the next choice appreciably harder or stranger. There is enough uncertainty to sustain interest in what the couple will do. The dramatic machinery becomes less persuasive when it asks repeated agitation to supply the development missing from those choices.
Abigail’s affair creates a second source of threat within the marriage, though Kerry Washington has too little connective material to make its collision with the kidnapping fully revealing. Abigail’s refusal to employ Ramon gives her a precise role in protecting the household’s political respectability; the affair establishes a private breach of that controlled appearance.
Between those actions, the characterization remains thin. Her lover Ron, briefly played by Ray Fisher, imagines living together in a modest apartment on La Brea, introducing the possibility of a life stripped of their present comforts. The film barely explores what such a prospect means to her before returning to the couple’s recriminations.
The house could make these intersecting dependencies painfully close. Employer and employee, parent and candidate, spouse and public partner are all caught within the same domestic space. Affleck’s direction rarely extracts that pressure from the rooms. Much of the confrontation settles into shot/reverse-shot coverage, with the actors’ escalating delivery carrying the burden of urgency.
Robert Elswit’s photography gives the property a polished finish, but the repeated conversational setups leave its social arrangements largely to the dialogue. The sweeping aerial views of Los Angeles expand the visible geography while interrupting the confinement, offering a city the drama seldom engages beyond Mark’s ambitions.
The dawn confrontation in the Los Angeles River basin finally takes the crisis outside, yet its slow-motion treatment pushes the action toward inflated spectacle. The movement into public space does little to develop the city’s relationship to the families.
That task falls instead to the satirical coda and its attention to macho political image-making. Here the film finds another implication of Sam’s earlier calculation: a public appetite for forceful leadership can absorb conduct that should invite scrutiny. After the private arguments over money, responsibility, and self-preservation, the machinery of political presentation remains ready to turn a man’s behavior into evidence of his fitness to lead.
Animals was released globally on Netflix on October 9, 2026. The crime thriller follows a Los Angeles mayoral candidate and his wife who must scramble to gather a ransom after their son is kidnapped, plunging them into a dangerous underworld.
Where to Watch Animals (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Animals
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: October 9, 2026
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes (106 minutes)
Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, Ben Affleck
Producers and Executive Producers: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Brad Weston, Dani Bernfeld, Collin Creighton
Cast: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Steven Yeun, Matt Gerald
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Robert Elswit
Editors: William Goldenberg, Christopher Rouse
Composer: Harry Gregson-Williams
The Review
Animals
Animals finds sharp political material in a household that accepts an undocumented man’s care while refusing him employment. Affleck’s strained composure and Anderson’s expensive-looking calm give its moral calculations some life. Yet the threatened family receives too little dramatic attention, repeated arguments stall the pressure, and conventional staging leaves Los Angeles largely decorative. The film recognizes how privilege can turn another person’s emergency into an opportunity, then devotes much of its energy to the privileged couple’s grievances.
PROS
- Concrete, incisive contradictions between private dependence and public respectability.
- Affleck’s convincing erosion of political composure.
- Anderson’s entertainingly controlled fixer.
CONS
- Cecilia and Ramon remain confined to Mark’s moral dilemma.
- Repeated arguments substitute agitation for dramatic development.
- Abigail’s choices lack sufficient connective characterization.
- Conventional coverage and inflated climactic spectacle weaken tension.
