Animal Kingdom, review

This Australian crime-family thriller is bursting with energy and ideas and features a terrific, Oscar-nominated performance from Jacki Weaver.

Director: David Michôd; starring: James Frecheville, Guy Pearce, Jacki Weaver and Joel Edgerton.

There’s enough in Animal Kingdom, David Michôd’s febrile tale of a Melbourne crime family, for a whole miniseries’ worth of sweat and apprehension. He packs a lot in – it’s a writing-directing debut with a thousand ideas and no intention of saving them for later.

We’ve barely been introduced to this tight-knit clan, the Codys, before they’re skittering towards ruin, much of it at each other’s hands. Pungent scene by scene and bracing in its cumulative impact, Michôd’s movie suggests what Aeschylus might have had in mind, if the House of Atreus had been fond of seafood barbeques.

Our focal character is J (James Frecheville), youngest of the bunch, though “focal” is an odd word for a personality as flat and unresponsive as bulletproof glass. He begins the film staring vacantly at a gameshow, with his mother, dead of a heroin overdose, next to him on the sofa. Some might be tempted to call the newcomer Frecheville the weak link in this cast, but his inexpressiveness is interesting, keeping us at a cold and wary remove.

The real fear with his uncles, of whom there are three, and whose relationship with the police is best described as not very cordial, is that he could turn into any one of them with sufficient dead time on his hands.

The scariest is Pope (Ben Mendelsohn, never better), whose lifelong vendetta against the cops feels like an outlet, a way for this cracked psyche to spill its venom without imploding.

Michôd’s in serious danger of scratching empathy from his film’s agenda altogether, but his characters cling on to each other with such instinctive, white-knuckle need their fate holds a zoological fascination.

Take Janine (Jacki Weaver), a sweet reptile of a matriarch who hangs around, all concern and kisses, wet ones, on the mouth, for a beat longer than is generally appropriate with your grown sons. She’ll do anything to keep her nearest kin out of jail, even if it means feeding a stray to the crocodiles.

Weaver’s Oscar-nominated performance is gold here, and Michôd knows it: he sneaks her in around the edges, then hands her all the juiciest scenes on a plate in the last third. When the film ends, you can still sense him scribbling away at what these folk – the survivors, at least – are capable of doing to and for one another.

Michôd could get away with calming down a little on his next project, and applying his trancey sound design less like an all-purpose ambient blanket to knit the plot together, but you wouldn’t want to curb this quicksilver ambition too much.