Review: Animalia
The Aliens Want to Buy the World a Coke
It takes a good long while for Animalia to out itself as an alien invasion film of the Body Snatchers flavor. I’m not complaining. The approach not only creates a tantalizing narrative where we’re observing the phenomenon from the fringes – much like the characters in the film – it also sets us up for what might be a more impactful experience, one tied to an intriguing visual metaphor that co-writer/director Sofia Alaoui employs throughout the film.
Left alone in a palatial mansion in Morocco after her wealthy husband and his enormously powerful kin travel to a reception in another town, the pregnant Itto (Oumaima Barid) must rely on her own devices to reunite with her family when the world starts turning upside down. Her neighbors are fleeing, the army is mobilized, and animals -- dogs and sheep and birds and insects – are acting strangely. Like, forming ritualistic circles strangely. Her odyssey includes contending with hostile villagers, undergoing interference by flocks of aggressive corvids, encountering a teenage shepherd who claims he’s seven years old, and taking a detour into a giant, glowing column of water that imparts weird, out-of-body visions.
It's those animals that I keep thinking about, though. In the context of the invasion scenario, they serve as the harbinger of the incursion to come: They’re the first in line to succumb, manifesting behaviors that simple beasts should not be capable of. (One quite beautiful mongrel befriends Itto as her kind-of temporary guardian angel, and at one point delivers a bite that “infects” a panicked villager with the alien presence.) But I think in employing as a vector of invasion creatures who can wander amongst us largely unheeded, Alaoui is also delving into something deeper.
At the risk of dragging up a hoary, well-worn concept, we all come from the same origin point. At some time, billyuns and billyuns of years ago, we were literally all one. Then came the Big Bang, and it was downhill from there. In Animalia, Alaoui has found her own way of reminding us that we’re a lot closer to each other than we commonly imagine.
For all its SF/horror trappings, Animalia is very much a commentary on class, seen through the journey of Itto – who, by the love of her husband, has been raised up from her humble youth to the realm of elites, a station she’s not necessarily comfortable with (in an early scene, she’s happily helping the house staff prepare a meal), and who becomes re-immersed in the world of those who don’t have a coterie of servants to see to their every need. In that context, the idea of the woman having her consciousness raised via her growing awareness of the creatures who weave within the spaces between us manages to literalize the invisible connection we have to all living things, and to humanity specifically. In the end, we’re left wondering if this is an invasion at all. Maybe it’s just an outside force, seeing what a mess we’ve made of things, and deciding to take a hand in the situation.
Alaoui keeps her intent vague. At the end of Animalia, not much has changed, except that Itto is now sensitized to the fact that another consciousness occupies the Earth, and perhaps those around her as well. Itto’s perception of the world, and her understanding of what it could be, has been inextricably altered. Invasion this may be, but if it manages to clear away the artificial barriers between people, is it all that bad?