Animalia Review
Itto (Oumaïma Barid), a pregnant young Moroccan woman from a poor background, lives with her husband Amine (Mehdi Dehbi) and his wealthy family. One day, they go off for some important business with the governor, leaving her alone. Then, the world turns upside down. They can’t get back to her, and the strong military presence makes it difficult to leave the house. Eventually, thanks to the help of kind local Fouad (Fouad Oughaou), she embarks on a perilous journey to find Amine again. It’s a journey that will change the lives of everyone involved.
If you can see writer-director Sofia Alaoui’s debut feature Animalia in a cinema, you should. The film is extraordinary on both a visual and aural level, with sweeping desert vistas, extraterrestially expressionistic montages, an immersive soundscapes making it an utterly transportive experience – the bigger and louder you can see it, the better.
But there’s also a more grounded human story anchoring all that stylistic aplomb. Although Itto now lives a life of luxury, she was not born into it the way her husband was, and the gap in their statuses is felt very keenly both by her and her chilly mother-in-law (Souad Khouyi). When Itto is left to fend for herself in the wider world, she at first tries to deal with every problem by shoving a wad of cash at it, which rarely ends up yielding the intended effect. When you add in her status as a woman alone in a patriarchal society, it all becomes a fascinating exploration of class and gender under the most unusual stressors.
The first act is primarily concerned with Itto’s terrestrial troubles. Gradually, the otherworldly starts to seep in, most notably in the strange behaviour of the stray local dogs, whom she finds eerily sitting in a circle one night as if they were planning something ominous. Mobile signals are spotty, and the TV news is vague. Military police are everywhere, but no-one seems to know why.
And answers aren’t readily forthcoming. Alaoui ramps up the unnerving ambiguity at a deliberate, gripping pace, keeping her film engaging even as we increasingly suspect we may never get an explanation for what on earth is going on. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Animalia is that it doesn’t really matter. The movie is so vast and dense, it invites all sorts of readings – it’s a story about class, gender, the limitations of organised religion, fear of impending motherhood. Yet there’s something at the core of it that defies neat categorisation. Towards the end of their journey, Itto asks Fouad, “Do you think there’s a meaning to all this?” He replies, “We must find one, in any case.”
In the hands of a lesser writer-director, this ambiguity could have seemed a cop-out. Alaoui, however, is so authoritative and deliberate in both of her roles, there’s never a moment when it appears she’s lost the thread of her wildly ambitious, thought-provoking movie. Perhaps more than anything else, Animalia is about how the hunt for life’s answers is so often beside the point.
★★★★★
