Les Animaux Anonymes | 2020| France | Directed by Baptiste Rouveure
Logline: Humans are being hunted and held captive like animals by humanoid figures with animal heads.
In the space of just an hour writer/director Rouveure presents a chilling portrait of the predatory relationship between humans and animals reversed for allegorical purposes. If the tables were turned for the hunter and the hunted, this is how the grotesque scenario would take shape in our nightmares, and it makes for a deeply unsettling experience.
It is the rugged beauty of the French countryside, but it could be anywhere in the world. A man is chained to a roadside tree. A car passes, its driver obscured, then turns and pulls up near the man. A figure gets out. It is a not a human, but is acting like one. The trapped man has fear lodged in his eyes. He is put in the back of the small van and taken to a farm where he is treated like an animal. Fed scraps, chained up, and awaiting his fate, pitted against another human for his captors’ amusement.
The farm is run by beasts. To be precise, they have the bodies of humans, but the heads of farmyard animals; a horse, a bull, some dogs, a reindeer, a ram, even a bear. These “humanimals” don’t talk, they only grunt and bark and snort and salivate. The human captives don’t speak either. The entire film is free of dialogue, and by doing so, heightens the oneiric atmosphere.
This is very much like a bad dream.
Very little actually happens, the film is devoid of a conventional plot, instead structured with a series of short scenes, fading in and out, vignettes linked by the concept of the tables turned. Is this a horror movie of Mother Nature’s revenge? Is this a darkly comical satire of humankind’s cruelest attributes? Is this an artfully constructed reverse psychology study of the exploitation of animals by humans? Or maybe it’s a strange and surreal PETA-endorsed infomercial?!
Beautifully captured in rich, dark hues by cinematographers Kevin Brunet and Emmanuel Dauchy, the repeated contrast of the tranquility of the landscape and the flora, with the cold and empty textures and spaces of the human built machinery and enclosures. There is a dark poetry at work, a tension slowly mounting, reaching its most powerful - albeit fleeting - moment in the closing images. Repetition comes full circle, the true monster revealed.
As a statement Anonymous Animals is slow-burn and yet succinct. It is horror movie as emphatic creature. As viscerally restrained and suggestive as it is morally disquieting and pointed. Its greatest strength is that it plays out like some kind of subconscious alternate reality, likely to linger in your mind for days, food for thought, if you’ll pardon the pun. Indeed, you haven’t seen anything quite like this.