Australian Penthouse

Animal Kingdom
Director:  David Michod
Star:  Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver
Madman Entertainment

Animal Kingdom centres around a Melbourne family of drug dealers—a popular topic post-Underbelly—and the extended family’s rapidly escalating violence with the police.

The viewer sees events unfold through the eyes of the film’s protagonist and youngest family member, 17-year-old Joshua (James Frecheville), an adolescent wrestling with his allegiance to his family and his conscious.

Written and directed by David Michod, what is so different about Animal Kingdom compared with many other Melbourne underworld movies and TV series of late, is that it doesn’t glorify the drug trade, or life “in the business”.

There are no dramatic gun scenes, no wads of money counted, no mountains of cocaine piled on table-tops. The movie instead focuses on the cascading errors in judgement shown by the family, coupled with the audience’s underlying belief that no good will come of the deaths and drug use—primarily via the expressive-yet-passive narration of Joshua throughout the film.

Ben Mendelsohn steals the show as the increasingly psychotic ‘Uncle Pope’, a man who delves deeper into paranoia, and eventually insanity, due to the mounting death-toll surrounding him and his trigger-happy, drug-taking antics. Winner of the 2010 Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Drama at Sundance, Animal Kingdom presents Australian story-telling in a new light, and is definitely worth watching.

Animal Kingdom opens in cinemas nationally on June 3.