From the moment Emma Benestan’s Animale begins, it is apparent that this is no ordinary fantasy horror movie. The film follows Nejma (Oulaya Amamra), a woman training for a bull racing competition. The sport is heavily male-dominated, so she is confronting the usual amount of sexism. She eventually perseveres and believes she is gaining the respect of the men on her team. She lets her guard down, and they get her drunk and take her to the middle of nowhere. Nejma blacks out and awakens with unexplainable wounds and bruises. The men she trusted make excuses, and she tries to shake off whatever transpired. However, the body keeps score. More importantly, not everything should be forgotten or forgiven. As Nejma begins to change and her memory of that night’s events starts to return, a string of gruesome murders begins to plague her town.
The Werebull: Revenge and Femme Rage
Animale really drives home how inhumanely bulls are treated in these sports and connects that thought to how men abuse women. However, it takes this thought further than we could have ever dreamed and gives us a werebull exacting revenge on rapists. This is such a wildly stunning take on something so traumatic that it elicits a whole wheelhouse of emotions as an audience member. Am I team werebull and happy we have a movie about femme rage? Absolutely. Do I think this is a powerful story? Of course. Am I tired of women characters getting assaulted in most of the media we get? One hundred percent.
Emma Benestan and Julie Debiton’s script takes care not to glamorize assault and does not conflate rape with sex, which is where so many male filmmakers fail this assignment. The way the abuse is shot is not gratuitous and never lingers. I think Animale and Blink Twice are two of the best recent movies to deal with rape culture because they take care of the audience. They also understand people will pick up what has transpired without fifteen minutes of women being brutalized. Both films have faith in their actors and their scripts to convey a message free of the layer of film bro sleaze that we are typically subjected to when we watch rape-revenge films.
Oulaya Amamra’s Heartbreaking Performance
Oulaya Amamra’s performance as Nejma is endearing and heartbreaking. Nejma is looking for a place in the world as she seemingly has no family. Like many of us, she is in a male-dominated field and used to a certain level of misogyny, but is still trying to coexist with men who disrespect her because of her gender. So much so that she spends most of the movie trying to hold the truth about what happened to her at arms-length. Watching her figure out what the audience knew from the second the guys took her to a second location is reminiscent of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. It feels like being punched in the gut for the second time when she finally pieces it together. When the men who violated and gaslit her start dying grisly deaths, it is hard not to clap.
As the town begins to wonder what kind of animal is tearing apart their supposedly upstanding men, we get the surprise werebull. I love this werebull and am happy that some part of Nejma was able to exact revenge while the rest of her was still processing her trauma. This also ties together the mistreatment of animals and the mistreatment of women thread the movie has from the beginning. The majestic creatures, who she wanted to race alongside the men she thought were her friends, become the family she is in search of. They take her in as one of their own and protect her from those who would further harm her. Again, it feels weird to call this film beautiful, but it is too poignant to be called anything else.
Transformation and Primal Horror
Animale knows its audience well enough and eventually stops hinting at the werebull. The film gives us a full-on transformation as Nejma goes after the last man standing. This is terrifyingly effective and gives us just enough body horror to force us to lean even further in our seats. It is hard to not feel the bloodlust and root for her to tear him apart much like he did her. This is good for her horror at its most primal and feverish. The empathetic lens is ripped away as our plagued victim becomes a survivor and a full participant in making sure her rapist never harms anyone else. Where many movies claim they are celebrating feminine rage, Animale relishes in it.
It cannot be stressed enough that Animale is possibly one of the best films to come out of this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. As a professionally petty person, I wish we had more movies that let women be angry without sexual assault being the trigger. However, Animale is one of the few to understand the assignment, so it is hard to be too mad at it. Plus, it gives us a werebull doing the good work, so it will forever live in my heart.
Animale had its East Coast Premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 19th, 2024.
