Synopsis
Animal Kingdom (2010) is an Australian crime drama you can watch online on iFILM — David Michôd's feature debut, which took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and announced a filmmaker with very little interest in reassuring audiences.
Seventeen-year-old J Cody moves in with his extended family in Melbourne after his mother overdoses. The family is run, in the calmest possible way, by grandmother Smurf — Jacki Weaver plays her with such soft-spoken menace that she overshadows everyone else in the frame, including the three armed uncles. The clan is locked in an undeclared war with a police unit that operates by its own rules, and J is handed off between sides as a piece on a board he doesn't control. Guy Pearce's detective offers him a way out. Ben Mendelsohn's uncle Andrew is why that offer is so difficult to take.
Michôd keeps the violence offscreen more often than not, which makes it hit harder when it arrives. The film is less a thriller than a slow study in what it costs to survive a family like this one. Stream Animal Kingdom (2010) online on iFILM.
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