The Animals (2026)
There is a good short film somewhere inside The Animals, and a strong cast doing their best to find it, but Calvin Demba's eighteen-minute piece never quite gets there. It has a sharp premise and some real talent on screen, yet it states its point so bluntly, and then stops so abruptly, that I came away admiring the ingredients more than the meal. Two and a half stars.
The hook is a clever one. Gabi, a social media influencer played by Nathalie Emmanuel, is fawning over her partner John (Eric Kofi Abrefa), who fought off intruders in their home and has been hailed as a hero for it. In the glow of all that praise, the group jokes that Miles, played by George MacKay, would more likely have offered the burglars a cup of tea than fought them. Miles already feels like less of a man, not least because his partner Remona (Louisa Harland) is the household breadwinner, and the ribbing lands on him like a weight. Then comes the twist: the heroic break-in was a set-up, arranged through a paid agency that stages attacks so that insecure men can play the protector and feel big and strong in front of the women they love.
As a satirical idea about masculinity and the performance of it, that is genuinely good, and the film is at its most alive when it lets the concept breathe. The cast is the real draw. Emmanuel, familiar from the Fast and Furious films and Game of Thrones, is warm and watchable, and MacKay, who I have long rated from Pride through to 1917, brings a bruised, fidgety insecurity to Miles that is the best thing in the film. Abrefa and Harland are strong too, and the soundtrack is a cut above what you often get at this level.
The trouble is the handling. The film's thesis about toxic gender roles is delivered with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, every beat underlining a point the premise had already made perfectly well, so that what should feel like a sly provocation starts to feel like a lecture. And the story simply does not hold together under scrutiny: the logic of the staged-attack agency frays the moment you prod it, and the film seems more interested in the idea than in making it behave.
Worst of all, for me, is the ending. The Animals stops on a cliffhanger, and I have little patience for a cliffhanger in an eighteen-minute short. A feature can earn an open ending across two hours of investment; a short this length needs to land its punch and get out, and leaving the whole thing dangling felt less like ambiguity than like a film that ran out of road.
Two and a half stars. The Animals has a smart central conceit, a genuinely good cast and a nice sense of style, and in better-controlled hands the same material could have been something. As it is, it is too heavy-handed in its message and too ragged in its storytelling to be more than average, a frustrating near-miss rather than the biting satire it clearly wants to be.
The Animals screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the I See Myself shorts programme.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Pride (2014), The Muppet Movie (1979)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Macbeth in Compton (2026), Something Pointless (2026), Home (2026)
