David Michôd makes family loyalty frightening through patient, exact direction of actors. We recommend Animal Kingdom with conviction, though its slower passages show that his control of performances is surer than his control of pace.
Fi1m perspective
In Animal Kingdom (2010), a teenager enters a Melbourne criminal household and finds little reason to feel safe. David Michôd keeps Joshua ‘J’ Cody’s home life and the family’s criminal business uncomfortably close. He wrote the screenplay as well as directing, and understands how loyalty can become an obligation imposed on someone with little power to refuse it. This is where we rate him: he makes a familiar crime story frightening by taking its domestic arrangements seriously.
Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn give that approach its force, making family ties threatening without the need for constant action. We were unsettled by the scenes at home because their performances make belonging to this household feel dangerous. Michôd does not soften the gangsters to make them agreeable company, but he does allow their obligations to each other to matter. The violence has consequences beyond the immediate shock, which gives the quieter stretches something to sustain them.
That feature debut was followed by the lean dystopian Western The Rover (2014), then a change of scale with War Machine (2017), his first major studio-backed project. The latter is a satire starring Brad Pitt; The King (2019), co-written with Joel Edgerton and starring Timothée Chalamet, takes on Shakespeare’s Henry plays. These moves sit alongside his recurring interests in loyalty, self-interest and violence. They also make it difficult to file him simply as a crime director.
The patience that serves him in Animal Kingdom also causes its main problem: the second half lets the pace slacken. His preference for lean plots and little explanation gives us room to imagine the world, but it does not guarantee a brisk film. We stay with it for the actors, while wishing some of the slower passages were shorter. Start there for Weaver and Mendelsohn, provided an evening of uncomfortable family company appeals.
Biography
David Michôd is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He was born on 30 November 1972 in Sydney. He attended Sydney Grammar School and the University of Melbourne before graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts Film and Television School. He is a co-founder of the production collective Blue-Tongue Films.
Michôd wrote and directed the feature film Animal Kingdom (2010). He also wrote and directed The Rover (2014), War Machine (2017) and The King (2019). His other screenwriting credits include Hesher (2010). He has directed episodes of television series including Enlightened (2011) and Flesh and Bone (2015).
He is the partner of actor and filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes.
