Movie Review: "Animals" Asks, Can BFFs Really Stay Friends Forever?

Eff being polite, Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat go wild for the night in Animals.

To think, Billie Eilish was already singing "When the Party’s Over" before she turned 17.

I’m guessing the lead characters in director Sophie Hyde’s Animals never heard it, because they’re still letting the good times roll into their thirties.

Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) are a two-headed wrecking ball in the Dublin scene, drinking—and doing—anything that might pass by their noses during a wild night out.

It’s easy for Laura to justify her adventurous shenanigans; she wants to be a writer, and a writer must have lived-in experiences to write about, after all. The problem is she’s been working on her debut novel for 10 years, with only about 10 solid pages (and wasted journals of scrawled, disconnected sentences and observations) to show for it. When this dawns on her, she starts to embrace a quieter life with a solid, responsible boyfriend: professional pianist Jim (Fra Fee). But Jim’s not as raucous as Laura. In fact, after they start dating, he stops drinking entirely. In the mind of Laura’s gregarious American roommate, livewire Tyler, this is as red as red flags get.

Adapted by author Emma Jane Unsworth from her book of the same name (with the events relocated from London), Animals is a spirited though often sad examination of female friendship, and a friendship’s end; the hangover that arrives no matter how endless the fun seemed.

Its closest comparison might be the manic 'drinking buddies in squalor' comedy Withnail and I (Laura and Tyler are definitely doing better off, unconcerned with where the money’s coming from, though they have the same casual approach to cleanliness). I was also reminded of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, which married cutting barbs with melancholy. But this is also its own thing, largely thanks to Hyde, who offers Unsworth’s tale a dreamy, foggy-memory aesthetic a'la Jean-Marc Vallée (she’d be a right fit for Big Little Lies), the lights of late-night Dublin like fireflies illuminating Laura and Tyler’s sequined outfits. Anyone who was impressed with the Adelaide-based Hyde’s last dramatic feature, 52 Tuesdays, can remain assured we haven’t lost her for good: she also recently helmed the SBS miniseries The Hunting.

The reason to see Animals, however, is Grainger and Shawkat’s prickly, complicated double act. Shawkat may get the better lines (and the more inscrutable inner life), yet Grainger navigates the more dramatic fork-in-the-road, wondering if she's abandoning her feminist ideals on top of all this change. (An epilogue underlines how a natural evolution in one’s life can drastically alter your relationships.) It’s a coming of age story many will relate to, even if they’re not similarly being funded by parents and their partner well past the age of 30 to just be creative; it’s the revelation that a 'coming of age' doesn’t always come at 17, unless you are, indeed, Billie Eilish.

3.5/5

Animals arrives in Australian cinemas 12 September (with advance screenings in select cinemas). Rated MA15+ for strong sex scenes and drug use.