Netflix has dropped the official trailer for Animals, with Ben Affleck directing, co-writing, and starring as Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose world implodes when his son is kidnapped. Kerry Washington plays his wife Abigail, and together the two scramble to raise a ransom while a campaign built on carefully managed optics threatens to collapse under the weight of secrets neither of them planned on revealing.
Ray Fisher, Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Adriana Paz, Christopher Woodley, Matt Gerald, and Jacob Estrada. The film reunites Affleck with Matt Damon behind the camera through their Artists Equity banner, with Damon producing alongside Affleck, Brad Weston, Collin Creighton, Dani Bernfeld, and Luciana Damon. Affleck co-wrote the script with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray.
What Animals is really selling is the gap between the version of a person running for office and the version hiding underneath, a political thriller with a family emergency doing the excavating. It’s familiar Affleck territory tonally, the pressure-cooker crime drama he’s built a career on, but the campaign backdrop gives it a sharper edge: a man asking voters to trust him while quietly hoping his own family doesn’t fall apart in the process.
The film’s road to the screen wasn’t a straight line. Affleck told Entertainment Weekly he was two weeks out from shooting an earlier version, with Matt Damon opposite Jennifer Garner, when he learned Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were making Highest 2 Lowest, a kidnapping thriller with enough overlap to make him pump the brakes entirely. He shut the production down, but the story stuck with him. When he picked it back up, Damon was tied up filming The Odyssey, so Affleck stepped into the lead himself. He and Garner ultimately agreed she shouldn’t play his wife either, a decision Affleck credited to Garner directly: “I talked to Jen, and she was like, ‘We don’t wanna do that. You just get baggage.'”
That baggage question is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s part of what makes Animals interesting beyond the thriller mechanics. Affleck said the project let him dig into something more personal than plot: what a marriage actually demands, and how well two people can really know each other, even when they think they do.
Animals opens in select theaters and arrives on Netflix October 9.