Ben Affleck self-directs in Netflix's taut thriller Animals, and it looks hair-raising
Prepare for sub-optimal hostage negotiation
If you're going to reel in a massive star to front a new movie for your giant streaming service, why not get them to play two roles at once? I'm not talking about on-screen twins, either – Ben Affleck is pulling double duty in Netflix's newly unveiled movie Animals, since he's both playing the lead and actually directing the whole thing.
Affleck isn't a prolific director, but he has a few good movies to his name, and many critics think very fondly of The Town, which he made back in 2010 – so there's plenty of evidence to suggest that he could do a great job here. Like that film, Animals looks like a gritty portrayal of crime and criminality, but it has its focus on the apparent victim, rather than the criminals.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a politician who's fighting a mayoral election in Los Angeles while trying to balance his home life – but it looks like that home life is in for a reckoning. The teaser trailer uploaded by Netflix this week doesn't outright confirm that his kids are going to get kidnapped, but it does everything but say that explicitly.
It looks like he's going to be haunted by phone calls from the kidnappers as they try to presumably extort something out of him, and we can see the growing strain this'll exert on him and his wife (Kerry Washington) as the trailer unfolds. Stephen Yeun looks like he plays Kimball's fixer or security man, but there's at least one fascinating figure in the trailer.
We don't really know who she is, but Gillian Anderson gets an extremely glamorous entrance, and seems to be running the rule over Kimball. Is she a crisis manager? A fixer herself? Part of the criminal element? Any number of options could be accurate, and she might just be the movie's ace up its sleeve.
Intriguingly, the film's getting a rare simultaneous release – Netflix is putting it in cinemas as part of a limited run on 9 October, but it's also going to put it up for streaming subscribers on the very same day. That's a curious strategy, but we can't really know how it'll play out until that day arrives.
