Review: ANIMALS

Laura and Tyler are BFFs. They party all night, every night and crawl by day through hangovers to jobs they don't care about. As Tyler says, all days are the same forever which is why we need nights to divide them. Laura has been failing to write a novel for ten years which is as long as she's known Tyler. Family and friends ask her about it but by now it's as earnest a query as "how are you?" One night she picks up hunky young pianist Jim who is perfect. Things are about to change.

This is a film about friendship, real friendship, solid intimacy, the kind of friendship where memories of it are created every day. The film begins with Tyler asking Laura how they met. The dialogue is constructed of impressions without context; the speakers know what they mean and we can imagine. That kind of friendship. But it's also about the kind of friendship where the closeness means knowledge of weakness and temptation and what happens when its triggers are left untouched, even for a moment.

Under the images and the words and the music and the fun there runs a current which proves (without spoilers) to be the central journey. It does have to do with friendship but it also has to do with the recognition of its boundaries, how a lifestyle of fun as an expression of life has become a yolk. Laura really might have that novel in her but it won't get written until the present stops looking so much like the past. That dialogue about their first meeting appears twice in the film but never in real time; we hear the conversation but see the women who spoke it or are yet to speak it in vignettes of their shared experience. The arc is Laura's. These are her memories. For all the bracing declamation Tyler performs, the more stagy the more pertinent, it is the novelist Laura tuning her memory into prose.

There are many montages of the women partying and at first it feels repetitive. But there are so many the it soon becomes recognisable as part of the film's weave. With a lot of the sequences we hear dialogue between them in voice over. It's not just economical filmmaking it's quite accurate in that it indicates the difference between the words we use to construct memories and the images that appear to us more immediately are distinct. And we begin to understand that this is Laura's experience replaying, from the first frenetic and boisterous montage early on to the magnificent celebration towards the end. It is a cinematic realisation of a writer playing her capital of experience and eventually discovering her own voice.

Holliday Grainger gives us a Laura who is struggling against the wasting time but still resentful of what is expected of her as a young, bright woman. What we see most in her is doubt and even in the most gut chugging scenes of interminable boozing and snorting she brings a barely controlled self-loathing at yet another occasion where she has buckled rather than take control. One moment is told with intimidating truth: she surmises infidelity and flees the scene to privacy in a cubicle as her insides seem to be dissolving; she knows the worst is true and has no power to reverse it. It's exactly how that feels.

Alia Shawkat, whose team has included me since Search Party, takes a little more effort to fit into the more showy and declaiming Tyler. To be fair some of her rants (lifted by the source novelist) are more fashioned than natural but she does smooth it out and adds depth with some subtle pathos. If anything, her role is driven by denial and its friction with inevitability. A little stagy? Sure but she's just like that. Laura begins with a foundation whereas Tyler is on 11 from the start. It's a hard gig but Shawkat gives enough self-realisation to let us in before she turns into a pillar of caricature.

Fra Fee shows more than meets the eye and adds presence by (this will read like faint praise) being believably nice. Dermot Murphy as as the dark 'n' charismatic poet Marty has fun with his seducer-in-chief, offering clear allure and queasy danger.

This film has been called Withnail and I for girls. Hmm. Couple of things. Withnail and I was released in the '80s but set in the '60s. The two men face the prospect of having to grow up while the "greatest decade in the history of mankind" comes to a shambling, exhausted close. It's not entirely nostalgia; the '70s await with hard times and if these boys are actors they are going to have to start acting. That theme of youth's shelf life is common to both films but Laura and Tyler are lodged deeply into a social environment that is not about to reject them, those own-bootstraps are going to take a lot more pulling. Absent from the friendship of Tyler and Laura is the male reserve that prevents declaration of it: they love each other enough never to need to utter the "as friends" qualification. This, tellingly, is clearest when they are bickering which they do increasingly and with increasing stakes. Withnail and I is a deserved modern classic, effortlessly quotable and always enjoyable on a re-watch. Animals is a different case, using the language of cinema more delicately and getting in closer. The comparison doesn't hurt either film but is unhelpful.

I was hungover at the Nova (rhyme! well, in an Australian accent) and the sight of all that drinking was making me wince so perhaps I was well placed to sweep the infection of the fun from the slide and look more closely at the story of the women and how they were going to cope with that scission that must affect every relationship that starts in youth and continues to maturity. Also, I had a guilty recognition watching Laura tinker at her writing and frequently feeling like an impostor. Did that for a little over a decade with about the same to show for it. It was really meant to be something to start with  but in time it turned into a social introduction. And I was younger and rallying around with the same kind of fun folk. A drink always sounded better than editing. It had a painful resonance.

Pain and resonance are real flavours in the mix here but so are so much else. Animals is neither the jolly japes of young bohemians larking about as laddish ladies but nor is it a chick flick. Just as the greatest children's cinema works because everyone who watches it is or has been a child, everyone who knows the fear of leaving youth will find something here. I personally maintain that we are far better able to deal with accounts of our own lives if we dispense with nostalgia and recall the instruction of the years, for good and ill (this can be easier said than done, though). This story involves a lot of weakness but it is a tale of strength.