In 2018, Thomas Cailley created the television miniseries Ad Vitam, a science fiction thriller in which he proposed a not-too-distant future where humans could regenerate and live forever. "It took almost four years talking about immortality on a daily basis and when I finished I wanted to do something completely opposite, a film that focused on what was truly human," the French director comments to this newspaper regarding The Animal Kingdom, a film that has won the award for special effects in Sitges and will land on the billboard next Friday. The film, with a cast made up of Romain Duris, Paul Kircher and Adèle Exarchopoulos, narrates the effects of a pandemic that causes mutations in the population, turning those affected into animals.
“I wrote the script in 2019 and when the pandemic started I thought the project was over because what we were experiencing was very strong, but at the same time it was necessary to explain what was happening. Months later, when everything began to normalize, we saw that it was a situation that could be added to the script. There had been a revolution and then everything had returned to normal as if nothing had happened. Sometimes fiction films look for patient zero and it usually ends up being a panic story where people scream. And what interested me was to see what happened two years later, when society thought it had found a solution and how all that affected the intimate life of human relationships," he says about the origin of this production that caused a sensation in the section A certain look at the Cannes festival.
François (Duris) begins a trip with his son Émile (Kircher) to the south of France to be close to his wife, whose face has become covered in hair. She will enter a center to receive new treatment, but when the ambulance the woman is in suffers an accident and disappears, the husband will not know very well what her feelings are. At the same time, the boy also begins to experience changes in his body, which will make it difficult to hide at school and will raise suspicions that the father wants to avoid at all costs.
The director confesses that it took him a while to understand “how to approach the mutation from a realistic perspective because many times the werewolf transforms overnight or superheroes put on a costume and already have the power, and my idea was for it to be something progressive to discover the border between being human and something else.”
At the beginning of the film, while father and son are in the car in a traffic jam, Duris's character says that "today the brave thing is to disobey", a phrase that takes on special meaning because "the mutation tells us what to do." when there is a difference in a society that is structured around some norms. “François is forced to break those rules, to change his vision of things,” adds the filmmaker, for whom another of the prominent themes is the transmission between two generations: “Émile learns from his father and François from his son. It is a learning about courage and what it means to be a father. François must understand that his scheme is not the only valid one because to cohabit is to accept and respect that others can live life his way.
In The Animal Kingdom, there is a part of society that is afraid of these mutant beings and advocates locking them up and others who believe that coexistence is the key, something that can be extended to the current situation of a world that does not usually embrace the different. “The fantastic is the genre that allows us to use this metaphor of transformation as a universal theme. There are viewers who believe that the film refers to the migratory crisis, others that it talks about the mental health system in France and on the other hand it refers to the coexistence between humans and animals. All these topics interest me and help me position myself in a world that is bigger."
Exarchopoulos' role is that of a police officer who also questions whether to follow orders or act according to her conscience and the director mentions Norway as a country that "respects coexistence" and at the same time serves as a critique of France. which is not exactly very tolerable with the immigration crisis".
For the director, we live in a time of individualism and selfishness. Although "that's not all", because luckily, as the character of Nina, Émile's friend, reflects, there is also love and understanding. "What I wanted to try is to teach this biodiversity of human reaction. I am optimistic but I think there is a need to position ourselves morally in the world in which we live," he concludes.
