Animals Review: A Sharp Kidnap Premise, a Script With No Off Switch

Animals is worth watching for its premise and for two performers in it. Ben Affleck's sixth directing job is a Netflix ransom thriller about a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is taken on Halloween, and the best thing about it is a moral question the story asks over and over and never settles. What the film does with that question is where it goes wrong. Critics noticed. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 32 percent from 73 reviews and Metacritic sits at 33 from 21 critic reviews, both checked on October 21, 2026.

The film arrived on Netflix on October 9, 2026 with a limited theatrical run, runs 106 minutes and carries an R rating. Netflix's own weekly Top 10, published on October 21, 2026, has Animals holding the top spot on the English-language film list for the week of October 12, 2026, with 30.8 million views. That is reach. The numbers below are the approval.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it for the premise, for Kerry Washington and above all for Gillian Anderson, and accept that Ben Affleck will not let a single idea sit still. A 106-minute, R-rated Netflix thriller with 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 73 critic reviews as of October 21, 2026, and 33 on Metacritic. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Animals is about

Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck) is a self-financed independent running for mayor of Los Angeles, a lawyer and a first Gulf War veteran with no platform worth hearing and a habit of quietly moving money out of the joint account to keep the campaign alive. On Halloween, while his son Denny (Christopher Woodley) is out trick-or-treating, a voice-modulated caller tells Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) that Denny has been taken, and that $7 million has to be in a bag before midnight. Affleck shoots the first stretch as one long unbroken panic, and it is the strongest filmmaking in the film: two people shouting on phones in a beautiful house while the money they do not have becomes the entire plot.

They cannot raise the ransom, so Mark's campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) brings in Dayle (Gillian Anderson), a fixer in an all-white suit who solves problems for a fee of $1.4 million and the house as collateral. What follows is a lesson in how a kidnapping becomes a campaign. Mark and Abigail talk in irritated circles about strategy and conscience, the caller keeps the line open, and the campaign keeps needing Mark to be somewhere else. Affleck's own framing, told to Netflix's Tudum, was that the film asks "whether people have a real moral compass, or [if we] seek to do what's in our best interests, and build a story around that."

Cast and performances

Affleck plays Mark as a man performing competence at a level he does not feel. Empire's John Nugent gave the film three stars out of five and found it a mixed bag, far from Affleck's best work but with glimmers of his muscularity and sharpness as both filmmaker and actor. The A.V. Club's Jacob Oller read the performance as a mode Affleck has used before, "smarmy, unscrupulous, under the gun," and noted that this is his first film since Air and the first he has co-written since Live By Night.

Kerry Washington plays Abigail, a psychologist whose marriage is fraying and whose mouth is quicker than the script deserves. The Guardian's Jesse Hassenger found the actors playing to the cheap seats, especially Washington, who can overact a whisper if called upon to do so. New York magazine's Bilge Ebiri found the film begins awkwardly, proceeds chaotically, and ends ludicrously.

Gillian Anderson is the best thing in the film. Dayle arrives with a white suit, a line about leverage that sounds like it was workshopped, and the only calm in the story. Empire's Nugent called her a kind of white-pant-suited Winston Wolf who solves problems, and also one of the more overwritten characters in the film, lumbered with dialogue about leverage and the consequence of refusal. IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio wrote that for "every piece of drone footage sweeping across LA, every shot that carves out about two feet of space between actors with no sizzle, I kept wishing for more Gillian Anderson, more Gillian Anderson, please."

Luis Gerardo Méndez plays Ramon, the housekeeper's undocumented partner, and Adriana Paz plays Cecilia, the housekeeper. Washington told Tudum the film asks who matters, what the value of human life is, and whether that value is changed by race, citizenship or shared DNA, which is the film's argument in a single breath. Méndez plays the only character in the film with no power in the room, and he plays it straight.

What works

The premise, which is genuinely good. A ransom thriller where the question is not who has the money but whose child the money is for is a rare kind of hook, and the film keeps the question in the air exactly long enough for it to start to hurt.

The Los Angeles. Affleck shoots the city from a drone constantly, and the geography keeps changing as the money moves through it. In Tudum he described a long aerial passage that carries the viewer from the wealthy Westside through Mid-Wilshire, Koreatown, downtown and Skid Row and out toward the river, and said "that juxtaposition is real."

The lineage. Animals is a remake of a remake of a remake. Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) became Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest, and this is the third pass, which makes the resemblance a debt rather than a scandal. The A.V. Club's Oller made the point with some relish, calling the film "ostensibly an original film, written by Affleck and a couple other guys who've definitely never heard of Kurosawa." The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney made the same hinge his verdict, calling the film passably entertaining and asking why a movie this plainly indebted makes no nod to the source.

What doesn't

The script explains itself. Every theme in the film gets a line attached to it, and then a second line, and the second line is the one that lands. The A.V. Club's Oller wrote that the melodrama "pauses briefly for characters to say all sorts of silly pretentious drek," to conjure the specter of moral complexity out of thin air. Empire's Nugent found the result a little disposable, designed more for streaming than the weighted theatrical fare of his earlier directorial efforts.

The visuals are flat, and the film does not know it. Oller said Affleck became addicted to rotating drone shots that make everything look like a political advertisement rather than a feature film, and that the effects are laughably bad, with Elswit's camera floating up and away at random and doling out visual context for no reason. Variety's Guy Lodge, more generous, still called the film disposable pulp saved by Affleck's professionalism.

The middle has no conflict in it. Oller noticed that there is never any real conflict between the couple over how to approach the situation, with the fixer over how financially solvent the Kimballs are, or with the campaign manager over what this does to the polling numbers. Empire's Nugent put it more simply: "It's here that things start to devolve into genre silliness."

What audiences say

The split is the story. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 32 percent from 73 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 38 percent from more than 500 verified ratings. Metacritic's metascore is 33 from 21 critic reviews, labelled "Generally Unfavorable," with a user score of 3.2 from 32 ratings.

Letterboxd is the harshest number in the set, with a member average of 2.24 from 73,422 ratings and 25,495 written reviews. TMDB is the outlier on the other side, at 7.03 from 516 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026. The gap between 2.24 on Letterboxd and 30.8 million Netflix views is the gap between the people who finished the film and the people who put it on.

Where to watch Animals

Animals streams on Netflix and on Netflix Standard with Ads, and there is no free tier anywhere. JustWatch's page for the film carries a check stamp of October 20, 2026 after searching 376 streaming services, and TMDB's US provider list agrees on both Netflix tiers with nothing to buy, rent or stream free. The film also played a limited run of US cinemas from October 9, 2026.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Animals streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Animals worth watching? Yes, if you want a clever premise, two women doing interesting work and a Los Angeles treated as a character, and you can forgive a script that says its themes out loud. The 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the 2.24 on Letterboxd are not a rounding error, because the middle of this film is a seminar in a nice house. Affleck has built a machine with a live wire in it and then talked over the wire for most of 106 minutes. The 30.8 million views are reach rather than approval, and the reviews are the approval.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Animals

Denny comes home on his own. He had simply got separated from the other children on Halloween and walked back to the house, and the child who was actually taken is Hector, the son of Ramon and Cecilia, who was wearing the same costume on the same street.

So the question changes. The kidnappers still want their money, and Mark and Abigail now have to decide what a million dollars is worth and to whom. Mark and Abigail go to bed and wake up and the calls keep coming, and the film's last third is about the arithmetic.

Abigail has been having an affair with Ron Sperling (Ray Fisher), a UCLA professor, and Mark finds a message from him on her phone. The argument is the best-acted scene in the film, with Affleck and Washington both crying in daylight, and one of its lines was improvised rather than written. Washington said it "resonates for them": Mark asking Abigail whether somebody is Black, a question about who needs to be loved rather than who is loved. Afterward the two of them go to bed together and she ends it with Ron. The marriage survives on a technicality and both of them know it.

At the exchange in the LA River, a man in a rabbit mask pushes Hector down the concrete slope and Mark catches the boy. Two masked men go for the bag. Dayle's man Rand (Chris Gann) shoots them both from a distance, and then a third kidnapper, who has been waiting in the shadows, shoots Rand and then Dayle. Ramon, who has followed Mark, kills the last one. Dayle is dying, and Mark takes her phone, which holds a recording of him ordering the hits, and leaves her body in the riverbed with the three dead men.

Then the film does the thing it was building toward, and the thing is a transaction. At the press conference Mark claims that he shot the man who had taken Hector, and that Ramon went looking for the boy. Ramon is pushed forward as the story, the money goes with him, and Mark is given a year of probation, a fine and community service for a killing he did not commit. He wins the mayoral race.

The last we see of Mark is on a television couch with Gayle King, being asked what it felt like to take a man's life, and saying that in the moment it was easier than he thought. Abigail stands beside him for all of it. Affleck described the finish in one line: "The movie is really about marriage, what it means to attach yourself to someone, the bargains and exchanges. They don't truly know one another until the end, and then they decide whether to stay married knowing more of the truth."