Animals (2026) · ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5)

Dir. Ben Affleck · Starring Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez · 108 min · English

Streaming: Netflix

*

The setup: Los Angeles, the night before the mayoral race. Independent candidate Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck) is trailing badly, and his campaign manager Sam (Steven Yeun) has talked him into burning the family savings on a last-ditch Latino outreach push — money he fully expects to recover once he wins. His wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) has quietly started an affair with Ron (Ray Fisher) and is drafting divorce papers.

Then, on Halloween, their son Denny vanishes while trick-or-treating. A caller demands $7 million by midnight, no police. Mark can't pay — the money is already spent on his campaign. He brings in Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), a fixer who takes 20% win or lose, and the night spirals into something far messier than a ransom drop: when Denny reappears untouched, the family realises the boy actually taken was Hector, the son of their housekeeper Cecilia's boyfriend, Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez). From there it's blackmail, a hotel car park shootout, and a cover-up nobody planned.

The verdict: a genuinely good thriller that can't stick the landing. Affleck is a better director than he gets credit for, and this is confident, economical filmmaking — 108 minutes with almost no padding, which is a small miracle for a modern Netflix crime drama. Robert Elswit shoots Los Angeles beautifully: the hills, the mansions, the dead-of-night strip-mall LA. Harry Gregson-Williams' score stays tense without overselling. The film looks and moves like something that cost real money and had a real point of view.

The acting is the strongest thing here. Affleck gives Mark a brittle, self-justifying desperation — a man who keeps doing the wrong thing with the calm of someone certain he's right. Kerry Washington is excellent as Abigail: the film's actual moral centre, and she plays the slow realisation that her husband is a stranger with real precision. Gillian Anderson is the standout — ice-cold, efficient, faintly amused, and she walks off with every scene she's in. Steven Yeun makes a lot of a thin role as the operator who keeps offering worse options with a straight face.

Where it falters — and this is the ending. The third act has a real problem: it never explains its own villains. Who the kidnappers were, what they wanted, whether the whole thing was a setup — the film simply declines to say, and Mark never learns anything either. The result is a climax with no payoff for the mystery the first hour spent building, which makes the tension feel like it was rented rather than earned.

The moral bookkeeping closes far too neatly. Mark orders a hit, hides bodies, and the film hands him a mayoral victory and a national-hero narrative for it. That could have been a genuinely acidic satire about money and power — the title is right there — but the film blurs the point instead of sharpening it, so the final beat lands as abrupt rather than chilling. Abigail's affair, the rally material, the campaign-finance lie: all set up as things that will come back, none of them ever do. A sharper script would have let at least one of them detonate.

Bottom line: Worth watching for the performances and the craft. Affleck, Washington and Anderson are all doing strong work, and the direction and screenplay hold the tension well for two acts — this is a well-made film, not a lazy one. But a thriller lives and dies on its final ten minutes, and this one fumbles them: too much unexplained, too little consequence. Solid, well-acted, and then disappointing right at the moment it needed to be sharpest.