ScreenWize

Without question the best written Australian film since Kate Shortland’s Somersault back in 2004, Animal Kingdom is a moody, brooding and totally gripping examination of life inside a criminal family. Carefully and subtly crafted by writer/director David Michod, the top-drawer ensemble cast will have you wondering from start to finish just how things will play out in this fearful suburban world of kitchen sinks, police interview rooms and unspoken dirty drug deeds.

Seventeen-year-old Joshua Cody (James Frecheville) is a lumbering hulk of a teenager who has to move in with his grandmother Janine (Jackie Weaver) when his mother has an overdose. It is here he comes into contact with his uncles Darren (Luke Ford), Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Andrew (Ben Mendelsohn), ands their close friend Barry (Joel Edgerton). These four, linked as much by their life of crime as by blood, casually accept Joshua into the fold and he becomes witness to their brutal interactions with both corrupt and clean sides of the law, and their increasing paranoia as their suburban gangster world starts to collapse around them. As pressure builds from Detective Leckie (Guy Pearce), Joshua has to work out how best to play the deadly game of family politics.

Michod – who wrote the highly successful Edgerton brothers short film Spider – makes this a slow-boiling, nail-biting, psychological ride sliding around the quiet moments that fill a house full of fear and mistrust, and punctuating his cleverly open story-telling with moments of brief but bloody violence. Mendelsohn is outstanding as the unhinged man who knows no other life but this, and who will do just about anything to save his own sad skin. Newcomer Frecheville plays Josh with extreme care – creating a quiet youngster who feels and wants so much, but who must stay alert to the very adult traps around him.

Along with Michod’s cinematic confidence and careful pacing, the mood of the film owes much to its sinister score – credited to composer and sound designer Sam Petty. It helps create one of the best Australian films of the past ten years.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon