‘Animals’ Is Like A Sally Rooney Novel, But With 30Somethings Who Love Ketamine
If you hated 'Trainwreck', you'll love this.
Sophie Hyde doesn’t mind the comparisons to Sally Rooney’s novels. Animals, the Australian director’s most recent film, is set in Dublin, for starters, but is also about female friendship — and how a crisis of character affects it.
“I really love Conversations With Friends,” she says. “I haven’t read any of those reviews [comparing the two] but the idea of trying to work out who you are as a human is interesting and it comes out in both of them. And there is a similarity in the voices — there’s a difference as well.”
Where CWF centres on undergrads playing as adults, the very funny Animals — an adaptation of British writer Emma Jane Unsworth’s novel of the same name — follows two 30somethings less concerned with appearing part of civil society.
Best friends Laura (Holliday Granger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) have known each other for a decade, and have filled it with boozy and drug-fuelled nights and casual day jobs.
But Laura questions herself when her little sister gets engaged, and she realises her debut novel is sitting at 10 pages — one for every year she’s been writing. She decides to shape up; but what does that look like, when you’ve been fighting against playing the role of Respectable Woman for your whole 20s?
“Laura is sort of stuck at a party, in a way that you can get stuck anywhere,” Hyde says. “You can get stuck in a nine-to-five or writing everyday at 6:00am or whatever it is… To me, safety is what’s going on for Laura and Tyler. They are very domesticated in their world, they’re not really wild. They’re doing all the things that are like, “Here I am being wild and free,” but actually I think Laura has to find a different kind of freedom.”
With that freedom, her relationship with Tyler — wilder, with little pretence for purpose — strains. Hyde and I talk about other comparisons Animals gets: Booksmart, Broad City, Sally Rooney’s novels, Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, Fleabag, and even, in some respects, Killing Eve. Why do we seem so interested in female friendship with an existential slant?
“What I’ve found is that people think there’s loads of it, [like] the one’s you’ve just said, and that’s pretty much it,” she says. “We’ve been asked, ‘What are you’re favourite things about female friendship?’ and we were like, ‘Broad City, Francis Ha…’, we were trying to come up with it, and actually it was few and far between. It feels very visible because there’s a lot of attention on it, but there’s not that much of it still I think.”
Hyde also says that the intensity and occasional co-dependency of female friendships is also still new to our screens.
“You can fall out with friends and no one ever notices, or there’s no grieving for it or anything. Yet it can be this really intense, very important relationship.”
“It’s like you’ve become each other’s person and that’s very messy to deal with, particularly when we don’t have any names or rules for it,” she says. “In some ways, that makes friendship better than romantic love, but in some ways it’s also like you can fall out with friends and no one ever notices, or there’s no grieving for it or anything.
“Yet it can be this really intense, very important relationship. And then when you live within someone like that and then they’re going to go and live with someone else, it’s a heartbreaking thing to happen, but you should accept it, because romantic love trumps it.”
That’s what Tyler struggles with, when Laura begins to settle down with her new boyfriend. Their drug and booze-filled nights are less common, but become more intense — in one, they steal more ketamine than they used to tame the monstrous protagonist from the stage-production of War Horse.
A few reviews post its debut at Sundance makes note of the frequent drug and alcohol use in the film — both with praise and critique. It’s rare the protagonists aren’t seen with a wine, whether its midnight or midday, and vomiting up their guts after too much k isn’t treated as a moment where they’ve Gone Too Far, like it often is in films. Still, it’s not Skins-style glossy hedonism either; for Hyde, it’s just what people do.
“My experience is we all often drink a lot, every social situation is based around drinking. I just wanted it to feel like a natural thing,” she says. “I think, as I said, they feel a bit stuck at the party, so there were times where it feels a bit shit, that’s really important, and there were times where it feels really good, but I certainly didn’t want to be moralising about it in any way, but I wasn’t trying to be shocking about it either.”
“[When I read the novel], I was just reading these characters who were very viscerally connected to the world. I could feel what it was like to be hungover when I was reading it.”
At one point, a flirtatious poet tells Laura, “I like the way you drink — it’s with a real sense of mortality.” It’s less of a compliment than he intends, but it’s also not cause to become sober, either, like in some ‘raunchy comedies’. Hyde tells me she loved that the novel didn’t wrap up neatly, because things — friendships, relationships, the quest to find purpose — rarely do.
“I was so unsatisfied by things like, Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s movie, where I was like, “This is gonna be great fun! Oh, no, she’s going to pour all of the booze out at the end and put on a cheerleading outfit and hookup with him.” It’s unsatisfying for us that that’s the answer….If that’s what we want, then there’s a place for that, but it just seems so boring.”
Animals screened at Sydney Film Festival, presented by Junkee, and plays at Melbourne International Film Festival August 2, 4 and 18. It is currently seeking distribution.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and is more of a Francis than a Bobby, and more of a Laura than a Tyler. Follow him on Twitter @Jrdjms.