Animals (2026) Review: Affleck's Dark Kidnapping Thriller

Mark Kimball (Affleck) is an L.A. mayoral candidate in the final, expensive stretch of a campaign that has devoured nearly everything he and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) have. When their son is taken, the kidnappers don't want a negotiator or a task force - they want cash, and they want it within hours. The problem is that the cash no longer exists. It has been spent on signs, ads, consultants, and the performative machinery of a man asking a city to trust him.

What follows is a desperate scramble through the margins of their own lives. Mark and Abigail have to call in favors they swore they'd never call in, sell things they never admitted they owned, and confront people and compromises that their carefully curated public image was built to bury. The film's cleverest idea is that the ransom isn't really money - it's the truth about who these people are when the cameras are off.

Affleck the director has always been more comfortable with texture than with kinetics, and Animals is at its strongest in the first act, when the camera is close and the panic is intimate. He and cinematographer work in cramped interiors and the sickly glow of streetlights, letting the geography of a wealthy but leveraged household do the storytelling. The screenplay, which unfolds in something close to real time, gives its leads long, uncomfortable scenes to play, and both actors rise to them. Washington is the film's anchor - watchful, strategic, and far more clear-eyed than her husband about what this night is going to cost. Affleck wisely underplays Mark's vanity, letting it leak out in small gestures rather than speeches.

The supporting cast is stacked, and some of it is underused. Steven Yeun brings a jittery menace to his scenes that hints at a more interesting movie, while Gillian Anderson and Ray Fisher are given just enough rope to make an impression before the plot hustles them offstage. Adriana Paz and Luis Gerardo Méndez add welcome friction in the film's middle stretch, when the couple's errands turn genuinely dangerous.

Where Animals stumbles is in its second half, when a tight domestic pressure-cooker mutates into something closer to a conventional conspiracy thriller. New complications arrive faster than they can land, and the movie's moral clarity - its sharpest asset early on - starts to blur into generic double-cross mechanics. A late reveal recontextualizes the kidnapping in a way that is meant to feel devastating but instead feels engineered, and the runtime (106 minutes) starts to show in the final reel as the film sprints toward a resolution it hasn't quite earned.

Still, there's real craft here. The sound design is excellent, the editing in the ransom-drop sequence is genuinely stressful, and the film resists the temptation to make its protagonist likable. Mark Kimball is a man who traded his family's security for his own ambition, and the movie never lets him off that hook - not fully.

Pros

• Kerry Washington delivers the film's most grounded, watchable performance.
• Tight, real-time structure generates genuine tension in the first two acts.
• Affleck's direction favors intimacy over spectacle, and it pays off.
• Strong supporting turns from Yeun, Anderson, and Paz.
• Refuses easy redemption for its morally compromised lead.

Cons

• The back half trades character drama for convoluted plotting.
• Several talented cast members are underserved by the script.
• A late twist feels manufactured rather than earned.
• Pacing sags in the final 20 minutes.
• Thematically promising ideas about political image-making go underdeveloped.

Animals is a better-than-average October thriller that aims for a character study and settles for a sturdy genre ride. Affleck and Washington give it a pulse, and the film's best scenes - two people discovering how little they actually know about each other while the clock runs out - linger longer than the plot mechanics that surround them. It won't be remembered as the high point of anyone's career, but it's a tense, well-mounted night out that earns its 106 minutes more often than it wastes them. Worth a look for fans of the cast, and for anyone who likes their thrillers with a bitter aftertaste.