Animal Kingdom: The Australian Crime Family From Hell

The title tells you what kind of film this is before anyone throws a punch. Animal Kingdom — David Michôd’s 2010 debut, and one of the great first features of the century — looks at a Melbourne crime family the way a wildlife programme looks at a pride of lions: no romance, no code of honour, just animals working out who eats and who gets eaten. The gangster picture usually flatters its subjects. This one strips the glamour off and leaves you with something closer to the truth of organised crime, which is that it is mostly frightened men doing stupid, violent things because they are cornered.

The boy in the doorway

We enter through Joshua “J” Cody, played by first-timer James Frecheville as a slab of teenage passivity, a kid who has learned that the safest expression is no expression at all. The film opens with J sitting on a sofa beside his mother, calmly watching a game show while paramedics work on her; she has overdosed on heroin, and J’s flatness in that moment is the whole character. With nowhere else to go, he is delivered into the house of his grandmother and her sons — the Cody boys — a suburban Melbourne armed-robbery crew whose world is closing in on them as the police tighten the net.

The clan is loosely modelled on real Melbourne criminal history, including the Pettingill family and the Walsh Street police shootings of 1988, though Michôd sensibly keeps the film a fiction rather than a case study. The brothers are a study in different flavours of doom. Sullivan Stapleton’s Craig is a coked-up live wire. Luke Ford’s Darren is the soft, frightened youngest. Joel Edgerton’s Baz, the crew’s calmest head, is the one man trying to get everyone out of the game and into legitimate money before it is too late. And presiding over all of them, played by Ben Mendelsohn in the role that announced him to the world, is Andrew “Pope” Cody — a paranoid, watchful predator whose stillness is the scariest thing in the film. Mendelsohn plays him as a man permanently just below violence, smiling in a way that never reaches the eyes.

Then there is Smurf.

Jacki Weaver’s matriarch

Janine “Smurf” Cody, the grandmother, is one of the great screen monsters, and Jacki Weaver’s Oscar-nominated performance works by refusing every cliché of the crime matriarch. She is warm. She is cuddly. She kisses her grown sons on the lips a beat too long, dotes on them, bakes for them, and it takes the film’s full length for you to understand that you are watching the queen bee of the whole operation — the intelligence and the ruthlessness that keeps the hive alive. Weaver never raises her voice. She barely needs to. When the family’s survival is finally weighed against J’s, Smurf does her arithmetic with a smile still on her face, and the sweetness curdles into the most chilling thing in an already frightening picture.

Against this domestic horror Michôd sets Guy Pearce as Detective Nathan Leckie, a decent, tired cop who tries to reach J and pull him out, and who narrates the film’s governing idea in a single speech about the natural order — the strong and the weak, and the crucial business of knowing which one you are. Pearce underplays it beautifully, a still point of ordinary morality in a film that otherwise offers none.

Why it works: dread instead of action

Michôd’s masterstroke is pacing. Animal Kingdom is a crime film almost entirely without the pleasures we go to crime films for. The robberies happen off-screen or before the story starts. Violence, when it comes, arrives fast, ugly, and without a musical sting to tell you it is coming — a car door opens, a thing happens, and the film moves on before you have processed it. Antony Partos’s score does not build tension so much as apply pressure, a low synth drone that sits under domestic scenes and makes a kitchen feel like a cage.

The craft lesson worth stealing is the film’s use of withheld information as suspense. Because J is passive and reads faces for a living — his survival depends on it — we watch the adults the way he does, hunting their expressions for the decision that will get someone killed. Michôd shoots a lot of the film in tight, slightly-too-close domestic framing, so that a living room full of family becomes claustrophobic, everyone sitting on top of everyone else, nobody able to leave. It is a horror-film grammar applied to a crime story, and it is why the picture gets under your skin in a way flashier gangster films never manage.

The performances are the other engine. Mendelsohn’s Pope became the template for a whole career of soft-spoken menace, and you can draw a straight line from this role to every quietly dangerous man he has played since. Frecheville’s blankness is a genuine risk that pays off; J is a mirror the audience projects onto, and his eventual flickers of agency land harder because he has given us so little to read.

The films it comes from, and stands beside

The obvious lineage for a crime-family saga runs back to The Godfather, but Michôd is working a different, colder seam. The real ancestors here are the crime films that strip away honour and leave only survival — the concrete-and-no-redemption tradition of British gangland pictures like Get Carter, where the genre’s glamour is treated as a lie. Animal Kingdom also shares DNA with the American cop-and-robber films that refuse to take sides, the moral flatness of Heat’s diner scene, where the law and the outlaw are simply two organisms doing what they do. And its bleak view of fate — the sense that some people are prey and the universe has already decided — puts it in the same church as the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, another film that quietly withdraws the comforts the thriller genre usually promises.

If you want the wider map of where this fits among modern neo-noir, I sketched a dozen of the essential ones in twelve neo-noirs worth the dark; Animal Kingdom earns its place on any such list.

The verdict

Animal Kingdom is the rare crime debut that arrives fully formed, with a thesis and the technique to prove it. It is a film about the moment a passive boy has to decide whether he is a predator or prey, staged inside a family so casually monstrous that the horror creeps up on you. Watch it for Mendelsohn and Weaver, two performances that redraw the boundaries of screen menace, and for a director announcing, in his first feature, that he understood exactly what he was doing. Michôd would go on to The Rover and The King, but he has never bettered the airless dread of this one.

Spoilers below

The engine of the film’s second half is Baz’s death. The one Cody with a plan to go straight is shot dead by police early on — a hit that may or may not have been sanctioned in the murky war between the crew and a corrupt arm of the force — and his removal takes away the family’s only stabilising influence. Pope, already unravelling, uses the grief and paranoia as cover to escalate, and the crew’s retaliation includes the ambush killing of two young officers, the film’s most shocking act of violence and its clearest debt to the real Walsh Street shootings.

The horror sharpens around J. Pope comes to see the boy as a liability — someone who has seen too much and might talk — and the film’s most disturbing sequence is his murder of J’s girlfriend Nicky, an innocent, to keep the boy in line and isolated. When J is finally pulled in by Pearce’s Leckie and pressured to give evidence, the family closes ranks, and it is Smurf who arranges to have the threat to her sons removed, meaning J himself. The revelation that the cuddly grandmother is the true apex predator is the film’s masterstroke, held back until the exact moment it will do the most damage.

The ending refuses catharsis of the clean kind. J, having watched the animal logic of his family play out to its conclusion, makes his own move — a final, quiet act that shows he has learned the lesson Leckie tried to save him from, that in this kingdom you survive by striking first. Michôd ends on J returning to the sofa, back where he began, now one of the animals rather than a triumphant survivor. Pair it with a rewatch of No Country for Old Men for a double bill on the death of the moral thriller.