'Animal' movie review: Another toxic film from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s ‘alpha male franchise’

If you thought Arjun Reddy/ Kabir Singh was toxic, then Animal will rattle your cage.

The film revolves around Ranvijay Balbir Singh (Ranbir Kapoor) with daddy-issues. The daddy is played by Anil Kapoor. He develops the need to please his father at a young age. This evolves into obsessive behaviour — he soon starts hunting his father’s rivals.  

Watching the broken and disconnected narrative, it looks like the director’s aim was not to tell a story in the first place. He even mocks poets and writers -- they envied alpha males, and so took to poetry to impress women, he opines. The film looks like an attempt to irk film critics and feminists who condemned his previous films. The vulgar gesture post credits could substantiate this claim. 

The Indian audiences have experienced a slow but steady transition in female characterisation — from ‘Sati Savitris’ to strong leading roles. However, Rashmika Mandanna’s Geethanjali in Animal serves the purpose of proving the “alpha male’s” capability of putting his “healthy babies” in her “wide pelvis”.

The answer to why such films are harmful and toxic is in the film itself. Rashmika’s dialogue, “when I heard what you did for your sister when she was ragged in college, I yearned for a man like you but ...,” she sighs in displeasure. From mansplaining to breaking her engagement with another man and telling her not to remarry if he dies, he holds her under his thumb.

As the three-and-a-half-hour film moves forward, Geethanjali questions her husband about the affair he’s had with another woman. The argument turns enlightening when she tells him she will do the same. When one finally thinks Vanga is trying to make a case for feminism, he disappoints by getting her to submit to her husband. This is followed by an intimate scene. 

The slaps are back. She slaps him multiple times but that doesn’t seem to make any difference to him — Vanga’s “alpha male” seems to have grown a thick skin over the years. 

Animal is nothing but a seven-course-meal of severe narcissism, autopilot plane sex, a post murder sex, a Rolls-Royce in the colour of hickeys, a mockery of menstruation, a lesson on pubic hair, a Made in India Atmanirbhar machine gun, bloodshed, gunfire BGM, Sikh men with guns, and Islamophobia for dessert.