In 2018, Thomas Cailley created the TV miniseries Ad Vitam, a sci-fi thriller in which he envisioned a not-too-distant future where humans could regenerate and live forever. "It was 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 is really human", says the French director to this newspaper about "El reino animal", a film that won the prize for special effects in Sitges and that will land on the billboards on Friday. The film, with Romain Duris, Paul Kircher and Adèle Exarchopoulos, narrates the effects of a pandemic that causes mutations in the population and turns 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 started 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 gone back to normal, as if nothing had happened. Sometimes fictional movies look for patient zero and it usually ends up being a panicked tale 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 this affected the intimate life of human relationships", he explains about the origin of this production that caused sensation in the Una Certa Mirada section of the Cannes festival.
François (Duris) begins a journey with his son Émile (Kircher) in the south of France to be close to his wife, whose face has been covered with hair. She will enter a center for further treatment, but when the vehicle in which the woman is riding has an accident and disappears, the husband will no longer 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 it at the high school and will raise suspicions that his father wants to avoid whether yes or not.
The director confesses that it took time to understand "how to approach the mutation from a realistic point of view, because many times the werewolf transforms overnight or the superheroes put on a costume and already have the power, and the my idea was for it to be something progressive, to discover the border between a human being and something else". At the beginning of the film, while father and son are in the car in a traffic jam, Duris' character says that "today the brave thing is to disobey", a sentence that takes on a special meaning because "the mutation asks us what to do when there is a difference in a society that is structured around rules. And François is forced to break them", adds the filmmaker, for whom another prominent theme is the transmission between two generations: "Émile learns from his father and François from his son. It's a learning about bravery and what it means to be a parent. François must understand that his scheme is not the only valid one, because to live together is to respect that others live in their own way".
In The Animal Kingdom there is a part of society that fears these mutant beings and advocates locking them up, and others who think 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 fantasy genre allows us to use the metaphor of transformation as a universal theme. There are viewers who believe that the film refers to the migration crisis, others that it talks about the mental health system in France and there are those who say that it refers to the coexistence between humans and animals. All these topics interest me", says Cailley, who insists "on the need to take a moral position in the world we live in".
