Only the Animals [Seules les bêtes] ***½ (2019, Denis Ménochet, Laure Calamy, Damien Bonnard)

Tragedy stalks the French countryside in director Dominik Moll’s 2019 thriller Only the Animals [Seules les bêtes], as Agatha Christie meets Claude Chabrol in an ingenious and engrossing, if highly unlikely yarn.

The Christie bit is the ingenious story, based on a novel by Colin Niel. The Chabrol bit is the flawed, tragic characters, sad lives and the French countryside atmosphere. It has to be said that all are shaken and stirred up very nicely indeed.

A woman has disappeared. She is Evelyne Ducat (the stylish Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who had the briefest of flings with a much younger woman, Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who has followed her to a small remote village in the snowy wastes. Evelyne is unpleasantly surprised and won’t allow Marion to stay at her house. So Marion installs herself in a caravan at the local camping site.

Evelyne dumps Marion, slapping her face when she insults her, but it turns out that someone has seen this incident, and doesn’t like it at all. Next thing, Evelyne’s car is discovered on a remote road – but no Evelyne.

Typically the police don’t have a clue, certainly not the callow, nice-seeming Gendarme Cédric Vigier (Bastien Bouillon), but five people with secrets do.

The acting is all good, but Denis Ménochet is quietly mesmerising as unhappily married farmer Michel Farange, who starts an on-line romance with a male fraudster, Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), pretending to be the sexy Armandine (Juliet Doucet) to defraud him of his Euros. Ménochet is very much a Claude Chabrol actor, truly credible even when his story can’t really be said to be.

Meanwhile, Michel’s unhappy wife Alice Farange (Laure Calamy) is having an affair with a local client, who certainly seems crazy enough to have done the murder – that is if it is a murder rather than just an unexplained disappearance.

The story is told in character’s name chapter heading, which probably worked better on the page, but is entirely okay on film. Each character’s story is theirs, so bits of the lives overlap and intersect, and we see fragments of scenes from different angles or points of view, with different information.

If the film is about anything, it is how we jump to conclusions that are almost certainly nothing to do with facts. But it is mainly a clever, twisty thriller, with perhaps one twist too many at the end, though it is still a very satisfying conclusion. You don’t quite see it coming, but when it does, you say ‘ah, right, yeah’.

The novel’s author appears as Vendeur coopérative (Cooperative seller).

The screenplay is by Gilles Marchand and Dominik Moll.

Only the Animals [Seules les bêtes] has a Curzon Home Cinema internet release in the UK on 29 May 2020.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Movie Review

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