Went into Animals completely blind, not realizing Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort was a straight-to-Netflix riff on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, arriving just a year after Spike Lee pulled off virtually the same feat with Highest 2 Lowest. That film was one of my favorites of 2025, successfully transplanting the 1963 classic into a contemporary setting with the help of Denzel Washington’s A-list gravitas and a remarkable turn of villainy from A$AP Rocky. The music-industry backdrop also felt like a particularly inspired way to rework the material, making it one of the more distinctive modern takes on a classic narrative. So, either Ben Affleck and company didn’t know about Spike’s remake prior to production starting on Animals, or they decided they had something to add to the conversation.
Animals marks Affleck’s first directorial effort since 2023’s modest, fleeting sneaker drama Air, though this time Matt Damon has opted to sit things out. Presumably, The Odyssey had something to do with that, alongside Damon’s stated desire to take a step back from acting, leaving Affleck to both direct and star in the film himself. He plays Mark Kimball, an independent politician on the verge of election night in his campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles. Running without the financial backing of a major political party means he’s constantly compromising to keep the campaign afloat, while the pressures of maintaining a spotless public image bleed into practically every corner of his life. His marriage to Abigail, played by a wonderfully sincere yet ferocious Kerry Washington, is crumbling before his eyes, and his ability to help the undocumented workers who maintain his home is limited by the same financial and political realities he’s supposedly trying to overcome.
Mark’s optimism is largely sustained by his campaign team, particularly his manager Sam (Steven Yeun), whose confidence in their chances may or may not amount to wishful thinking. Things get considerably worse when Mark’s son is kidnapped on Halloween night by a group of masked criminals demanding a ransom he simply doesn’t have. The scramble for $7 million brings in Dayle (Gillian Anderson), a fixer who offers to help secure the money for a cool 20 percent on top of the ransom. But, as anyone familiar with High and Low or Highest 2 Lowest can probably anticipate, the kidnapping takes a turn when the wrong child is returned home. Mark and Abigail get their son back, while the child of their undocumented household workers remains in the kidnappers’ hands. Suddenly, the question of moral obligation becomes a lot less theoretical.
Affleck has plenty of material to work with here: the tension between public image and private character, the financial compromises required to maintain political power, and the responsibility we have to help people whose circumstances are considerably more precarious than our own. These are all ideas I’m sympathetic to, both politically and morally, and the film’s central dilemma certainly gives them a clear dramatic framework. But that’s also where Animals starts to lose me. These are thematic layups, especially for anyone who has seen the films it’s adapting, and Affleck doesn’t seem particularly interested in making them more complicated than they need to be. The moral calculus is laid out plainly enough that the film feels less like an uneasy thriller than an exercise in watching characters arrive at conclusions the audience has already reached.
That’s a strange direction for an acclaimed actor-director to take, particularly so soon after Spike Lee made a much more compelling case for why this story still matters. Highest 2 Lowest found a contemporary world that gave the original’s class tensions and moral questions a distinct new texture. Animals, by comparison, feels content to revisit the same ground without offering much of a reason for the return. It’s not that the themes are unworthy of revisiting, but there’s a difference between having something worthwhile to say and simply choosing a worthwhile subject. Affleck seems to have the former in mind, yet the execution never quite convinces me that this particular retelling needed to exist.
The surrounding Netflix and A.I. conversation only makes that question more difficult to ignore. Affleck recently sold a majority stake in his A.I. company, InterPositive, to the very streaming service hosting this film, and his comments about using generative A.I. in filmmaking have attracted plenty of attention. He’s been reluctant to disclose what has been artificially generated, arguing that doing so would undermine the illusion. Fair enough, I suppose. I’m not especially bothered by A.I. in filmmaking as long as it isn’t churning out ugly visuals, lifeless scenes, or entire movies that look and feel like garbage. And Animals isn’t necessarily an example of that worst-case scenario. Still, it does feel like an afterthought interpretation of a narrative that has been treated with considerably more prestige elsewhere, which makes the larger conversation around Netflix’s approach to filmmaking hard to separate from the movie itself. Remaking a stone-cold classic international picture and not even allowing it to be seen in a movie theater seems antithetical to the last century of the art form.
For all that, I wouldn’t call Animals a disaster, nor would I rank it among Affleck’s more embarrassing directorial efforts. His filmography has never been one I’ve felt especially compelled to dig into, and this is perfectly serviceable as a modern thriller, even if its ideas are more familiar than provocative. If this is what a contemporary Netflix original looks like, we could certainly do a lot worse. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear, and a film like this needs more than basic competence to justify itself alongside two versions of the same story that already have considerably more to offer.
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I’m ultimately left with one question: why? What drew Affleck to this material, and what does Animals bring to the table that High and Low or Highest 2 Lowest doesn’t already provide? I’m sure there’s an answer somewhere in there, but after watching the film, I can’t say I caught on.
Score: 5/10
Animals (2026)
- Cast: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez
- Director: Ben Affleck
- Genre: Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 106 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: October 9, 2026
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