Only the Animals

Only the Animals (Seules les Bêtes, 2019) is a French-German crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. A wealthy Parisian woman named Evelyne Ducat vanishes during a blizzard in the highlands of southern France. Five people in the surrounding area — a farmer, his wife, a young waitress, a local outsider, and a man in West Africa who has never left his country — are each connected to her disappearance in ways they don't yet understand.

Director Dominik Moll tells the story in five chapters, each shifting the perspective and quietly undoing what the previous section seemed to establish. Denis Ménochet, Laure Calamy, Damien Bonnard and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi lead the cast. The narrative eventually stretches from snow-covered Cévennes to the Ivory Coast coast — a geography that only makes sense by the end.

Moll builds dread slowly and pays it off late, a method he used to similar effect in With a Friend Like Harry (2000). Only the Animals picked up the audience award at San Sebastián. Stream it online on iFILM.