Dominick Moll's twisty thriller begins with a missing woman in France's Lozère region and ends with the young Ivory Coast man who unwittingly set the plot in motion. Though Moll emerged as an international player with his third film, 2000's Hitchcock homage With a Friend like Harry, Only the Animals couldn't have existed in Hitch's era, since the internet plays a key role.
In adapting Colin Nie's Seules Les Bêtes with co-writer Gilles Marchand, Moll presents the story from five contradictory points of view. After a brief, inscrutable prologue in sunny Abidjan, featuring the young man and a goat, he introduces Alice (Call My Agent's Laure Calamy), a lively woman who runs a farm with her taciturn husband, Michel (Denis Ménochet), in a snow-covered mountain village.
A woman named Evelyn Ducat (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) from nearby Sète has just gone missing, putting everyone in the vicinity on high alert. Her car was found, abandoned, by the side of the highway. It’s no spoiler to reveal that Evelyn is dead, because that becomes apparent early on, not least when two different people end up moving her corpse.
Alice, meanwhile, has been sleeping with Joseph (Les Misérables' Damien Bonnard), a shifty neighbor mourning the recent loss of his mother. When his dog turns up dead and Michel shows up with a bruised face, Alice assumes, incorrectly, that the two got into a fight, but then Moll switches to Joseph's point of view, establishing his creepy connection to the victim.
After that, he backtracks a few days to Sète where Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young waitress, has been having an affair with Evelyn, whose older, the richer husband is never around. To Evelyn, it's a fling, but to Marion, it's something more. Her obsession leads her to Evelyn's vacation home and then, inadvertently, to Michel, who is convinced she's Amandine, the sexy, financially-strapped redhead he's been chatting with online.
Though he's never met her, he believes she’s the love of his life. The final segment returns to Abidjan where Armand (confident newcomer Guy Roger 'Bibisse' N'Drin) has just come into thousands of francs he's been spending on friends, parties, and a gift for a special someone. Once Moll brings Armand into play, all of the seemingly unrelated parts come together. If anything, there are a few too many coincidences, but Moll and Marchand have constructed a riveting tale centered on impulsive characters so blinded by lust that they’ll do anything to win the objects of their affection.
Although the film is never explicitly about race, it’s worth noting that the French characters are white and the Ivory Coast characters are Black. For reasons of desperation, both emotional and financial, the internet connects them in ways that provide solace before segueing into something more insidious. After a strong start, Moll's reputation was started to decline until 2019 when Only the Animals put him back on the map. A solid recommendation for library shelves steeped in Hitchcock, Chabrol, and noirish adaptations of Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith novels.