Why you should do yourself a favour and seek out this movie
If you’re young and female — or even if you remember once being so — do yourself a favour and seek out this witty and raucous celebration of friendship
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ANIMALS
Four stars
Director: Sophie Hyde
Starring: Holliday Grainger, Alia Shawkat, Dermot Murphy
Rating: MA 15+
Running time: 109 minutes
Verdict: A witty, raucous celebration of female friendship — and other hard stuff
Partying isn’t so much as hobby as a vocation for the two women who run fabulously amok through this arrested coming-of-age drama. Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) make Booksmart’s late-developing teenagers look like amateurs, which of course they are, but there’s a direct link between the two sets of soulmates in terms of their wicked intelligence and the way they embrace their sexuality.
Poets at heart, if not on paper, Laura and Tyler share a life of stylish squalor in a rundown flat in downtown Dublin — a shout-out here to the production design team which hits just the right note of op shop romanticism.
In between her day job as a barista, and her all-night benders, Laura is trying to write a novel.
Brave, brash and brazen, with a look that’s vintage Elizabeth Taylor, Tyler is more of a spoken word artist — someone should really document her putdowns for future generations.
She’s Laura’s biggest champion. She’s also her sharpest critic.
On the eve of Tyler’s 30th birthday, Laura realises that she’s somehow lost a whole decade.
While her best friend rages — fiercely, fearlessly — against the inevitable, Laura tentatively begins to explore an alternative path (which basically boils down to growing up).
She begins with a committed relationship to a classical pianist (Fra Fee), whose dedication to his craft draws attention to her own dilettantism (after 10 years, she has 10 pages).
Hovering on the sidelines is a rakish, Yeats-quoting bohemian (Dermot Murphy) who runs Sunday salons at his Gothic apartment and mentors young talents, such as herself.
Laura’s sister (Amy Molloy), who has recently become a mother, offers a not entirely comfortable “reality check”.
Adelaide’s Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays) directs this Irish-Australian coproduction, based on Emma Jane Unsworth’s 2014 novel, with a sure-but-sensitive hand. Unsworth, who also wrote the screenplay, has a superb ear for dialogue. “Do you love me?” “Not enough” is a personal favourite. Grainger and Shawkat are terrific in the lead roles. Their natural screen chemistry adds extra spark to this ode to literature, friendship and getting fried — told in the contemporary vernacular. Think a female version of Withnail And I and you’re on the right track.
Given the film’s enthusiastic reception at Sundance, and the critical buzz surrounding it, Animals is getting an inexplicably limited release in Australia. If you’re young and female — or even if you remember once being so — do yourself a favour, seek it out.
Opens at selected cinemas including Randwick Ritz and Dendy Newtown, September 12.
Originally published as Why you should do yourself a favour and seek out this movie