By Rachel Meghan
Starring Fenn Leon, Chris Hardy and Matthew Murray
Written and directed by Jamie Murray
376 Films
Behold, a film that shows you the darkest depths of the animal kingdom, while forcing you to confront the truth of human nature. Are we any different? Or better? This is the question that ANIMUS asks from its opening scene, in which a violent psychopath unceremoniously (and seemingly randomly) kills and cannibalizes another man in a car park. Why did he do this? Well, he’s an animal, after all. All humans are; we’re just lucky to have evolved as much as we have. How nihilistic, how depraved.
ANIMUS is the story of a fifteen-minute psych evaluation. A psychologist (Chris Hardy) examiness said psychopath (Fenn Leon) to see if he is fit to return to society. Spoiler alert, he definitely isn’t, and makes no argument against that case. One by one, Subject A-652 details the deadly habits of various animals, revealing the horror of nature in a strangely informative, documentary-like manner. The lead performances are solid, and their doctor-patient chemistry is on point and expected for this genre.
The orchestral score and sterile art direction give Animus a clinical look that’s utterly seamless and reminiscent of other psychopath-centric films such as A Clockwork Orange and Funny Games. The script is tight, with a lot of witty lines about humans being as inherently violent as animals. “Surely we’re past that?” Psych 2B asks of his patient, who is later exposed for the beast he is. Human nature can be pretty gnarly in and of itself, and the movie argues that none of us are particularly immune to it.
My only qualm with this movie was the use of AI. Anytime it is used in art, it cheapens the experience. For a movie about the naturalistic tendencies of human nature, it seems antithetical to feature anything LLM-generated. Aside from that, the short is a clean execution of a relatively simple concept. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the animals. They were here first, after all.
