Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Animalia” Is An Intriguing Combo Of Lo-Fi Setting And Sci-Fi Premise

As she nears the end of her pregnancy, Itto and her in-laws find their lives turned upside down by a supernatural event.

We’ve seen this sort of movie before. A community consisting of those who live rurally, in the suburbs, or with some degree of privilege is beset on all sides by an alien force that has arrived from outer space for reasons we could never know. Such movies have dominated the Hollywood space for many decades now, since around the time, audiences at large were worried about the geopolitical messes that abounded during and after the Cold War. They were all fables or, at least, allegories about how we as humans might respond to a nuclear attack by “the other” – whether that meant our resolve passed some existential test or we responded in kind to the threat. Such a response is a specifically American and broadly Western, of course. With “Animalia,” writer/director Sofia Alaoui considers what might happen when the citizens of a North African and almost exclusively Muslim country like Morocco are faced with such a threat.

There are obviously a lot of directions in which one could take this material, and Alaoui impressively at least hints at all the main ones in a relatively short amount of time. The project’s scope does, ultimately, get the better of the filmmaker, whose feature directorial debut raises questions that no one should be expected to answer by the end of a 90-minute movie. Nevertheless, here is a film about the Muslim faith, a direct challenge to its tenets (not to mention, by nature of the threat, those of any religion or belief system), and a protagonist who has already been challenging those tenets, though not by her own design. Itto (Oumaima Barid) is very privileged, alone, and pregnant, and then it seems as if the world could end.

Her husband Amine (Mehdi Dehbi), a successful businessman, goes off on a work trip, leaving Itto to revel in the delights of an empty house (a massive one, too, with a sofa that spans half the circumference of an entire room). The joy is undercut when a mysterious fog rolls in, affecting the animals in and around town with some hypnotizing power. Dogs and wolves become vicious. Frogs emerge in droves from a lake. Even the tiny ants on the ground behave abnormally, and Itto sees it as an opportunity to reunite with her suddenly unreachable husband.

The genre ambitions here are eventually revealed to be the stuff of allegory in a very different sense, with Itto embarking on the journey to find Amine with a reluctantly helpful deliveryman named Fouad (Fouad Oughaou). Together, they only find themselves directly inside the bubble of the fog, which inspires a series of hallucinatory experiences brought to life with an exciting sense of the softly surreal by Alaoui and cinematographer Noé Bach (the music score by Amine Bouhafa, meanwhile, complements that sense of the majestic). What really resonates in “Animalia,” though, is the human story surrounding Itto, played with an increasing sense of exasperation by Barid as the young woman handles her own pregnancy and the condescending riddles and foggy intentions of everyone around her. This is a curious work of science fiction – a bit elusive and, well, something else. That’s for sure.

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