Animals

Animals (2026), directed by Ben Affleck and released by Netflix on October 9, 2026, is set in the final days of a Los Angeles mayoral race. Independent candidate Mark Kimball (Affleck) trails narrowly, mostly because of Latino voters. He has put his savings and inherited fortune into a last big push for the election.

On Halloween, a caller says Mark's young son has been kidnapped and demands $7 million by midnight. Mark cannot pay, because the money is already committed to the campaign. He and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington), whose marriage is already shaky, turn to campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) and a British fixer named Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson).

The film asks who people are "when our masks come off", in Affleck's own words. It plays out as a pressure-cooker thriller and a study of politics and image-making. Critics widely compared its premise to Kurosawa's High and Low and Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest.

Affleck has framed the film as a test of whether people have a real moral compass or simply act in their own interest. The kidnapping works as a stress test that strips Mark, Abigail and the people around them of their public personas.

The film's cynical point, which Affleck discussed in relation to the ending, is that a politician can be unredeemed and still profit from a crisis. Virtue becomes a performance and a PR asset. The title suggests that, under the narratives we tell about ourselves, humans are animals driven by leverage, appetite and self-preservation. A line given to Dayle makes the same point: "Humans are animals who tell stories."

Some critics read Dayle as secretly involved in the scheme, based on her opaque dialogue. Others see her as simply a symbol of amoral leverage. The ending can be taken as a cynical satire of manufactured political virtue, as Affleck has framed it, or, as some critics argue, as a shallow observation that is not especially revealing.

The film arrived as another Netflix-era star vehicle for Affleck and Damon's Artists Equity, and critics mostly received it badly. Wikipedia reports negative reviews, and Metacritic shows a "generally unfavorable" Metascore of 33 from 19 critics. Reviewers compared it to High and Low and Highest 2 Lowest, and many criticized the writing as inconsistent and Dayle's dialogue as unintentionally funny. Much of the online conversation focused on Gillian Anderson's performance and on the improvised "Is he Black?" line.

Audience and critic reaction was largely negative. Letterboxd reviewers called it a wasted cast and an empty exercise in "corporate filmmaking". Critics called the script shallow and its structure disjointed. Praise went to the leads' sparring in the domestic scenes and especially to Gillian Anderson's eccentric, hypnotic Dayle, which reviewers found entertaining. Some viewers found it watchable but mediocre, and some dismissed it as an unacknowledged remake. The overall verdict is a watchable but disappointing thriller well below Affleck's usual standard as a director.