Animal: A Squandered Opportunity
A pointless and ineffective saga of a fractured father-son relationship that leads a man into a revenge frenzy beast.
Animal, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga is an Indian film released in 2023. It is a movie about a child’s obsessive love for his father and the aftermath of it. I watched the movie the first day it came out. After my initial watch, I was filled with mixed feelings inclined towards disdain for the movie. I decided to give my thoughts a second chance when the movie landed on Netflix, and here’s why I feel it was a lost opportunity to tell a genuine father-son film. Please be aware that I will be going into spoilers in this article.
Spoiler Alert!
Before I begin with what the movie could have been, let’s talk about what the movie was — all the good things.
Performances
The acting across the board was perfect, especially from Ranbir Kapoor. Kapoor blends himself in the role of Ranvijay Singh beyond recognition. He brings such intensity in every scene that you can see the mania in his eyes. The scenes between him and his father, played organically by the veteran actor Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire and Mr. India), are like those of two boats in a storm — despite their efforts to bring stability to their relationship, they keep crashing and sinking each other. You begin to feel empathy for the protagonist (at least in the first half of the movie).
Music
To say that the music of Animal is the best of the year is an understatement. The soundtrack features six songs composed by Pritam, JAM8, Vishal Mishra, Jaani, Manan Bhardwaj, Shreyas Puranik, Ashim Kemson, Harshavardhan Rameshwar, Bhupinder Babbal. At a time when Bollywood is plagued by below-average soundtracks from most of the new releases, the music of Animal is refreshing. ‘Hua Main’ and ‘Pehle Bhi Main’ seem to be cut from the same cloth as the singles from Vanga’s previous film Kabir Singh, and this is not a bad thing since the music of the said film was itself a sensation back in 2019. ‘Satranga’ stirs your soul and once again proves that you can never go wrong with Arijit Singh. I would also like to mention how ‘Arjan Vailly’ and ‘Kashmir’ have grown on me since their release.
Having covered the best of the film, let’s now talk about how Animal could have been a beautiful tragedy, instead, how it lost its motivation along the way.
An Unlikeable Protagonist
Despite being one of the best performances of Ranbir Kapoor’s career, his character leaves you despising him. It is completely bewildering to me why Sandeep Reddy Vanga went to such lengths to make the protagonist so vile that you end up not rooting for his character. This results in the audience distancing themselves from the character so much that their fate is no more a matter of concern. There are multiple instances of scenes where you are so triggered by his actions that the supposed tragedy in the climax is of no effect. The worst part is that these said scenes were not even required for the progression of the story. For me, even if the protagonist takes on the dark side, there should be a hint of goodness so that you root for him/her till the end. Animal failed me in that respect.
Sandeep Reddy Vanga and his idiosyncrasies
Sandeep Reddy Vanga has an undeniable tendency to bring such elements in his movies which are provocative for the sake of being provocative without really adding any nuance to the narrative. Some of the infamous scenes that come to mind are when Vijay asks Tripti Dimri’s character Zoya to lick his shoe to prove her love for him, or when he cross-questions his psychologist about her sex life, or when he asks his wife, Rashmika Mandana’s character Geetanjali to not remarry in case he dies, and that too right after when he’s been cheating on her. I do not demand a protagonist to be always morally right or to not have a gray shade, but there should at least be a reason to cheer for him/her at the end.
To be honest, I liked the movie until the halfway mark — it ended on a good high. There were a few sequences that irked me, for example, the inconsequentiality and ridiculousness of the body double and Vijay’s underwear tantrums, which were supposed to be funny, I guess, but I let them pass. But after that, the film just took a nosedive into a pool of absurdity. A lot of time was spent on the sequences which had no impact on the story — havan, church, Vijay’s character walking around naked — for some reason. Sitting in the theatre, all I could do was to ask myself “What’s going on here?”
In one of the interviews, Sandeep Reddy Vanga said that it was intentional that the antagonist was not revealed until the end of the movie. A daring idea, I must say, but it didn’t work, in my opinion. Bobby Deol’s character Abrar with a tragic backstory, was given little to do. I wonder how impactful it would have been if the said tragedy was shown and not just narrated, we would at least have someone to cheer for, if not the protagonist.
This article might come out mostly as a rant, but there was a lot to appreciate in this movie — the music, the background score, the editing, and the action. But I wish it had more sensitivity and heart. Or maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe it is Vanga’s way of showing the decline of a man into a beast, or maybe his interpretation of an animal personified.
Have you watched Animal yet? You can catch it on Netflix and form your own opinion and feel free to share in the comments here. Thank you for reading.
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