User reviews

Seules les bêtes starts off with the disappearance of a non-local woman that owns a house in a remote rural area somewhere in France. Multiple people's lives in that area are shown in this story, they are all connected in one way or another through work or simply because they use the same supply store. All of them, except the missing person, have lead fairly dull lives: They are regular people living fairly far apart, don't exactly like the life they are living and seek a way out of the day-to-day by the only limited means they have.

One seeks it online, another through adultery or through (creepy) fetish imagination but they all want the same. All of these lives are somehow stitched together, carefully explored and eventually coming together in a not every day, yet mostly recognizable story of loneliness, unemployment, deceit, feeling unloved, wishing for, and seeking a better life, real or not, even risking the little they have got and cross the invisible line.

Seules les bêtes is an enjoyable drama/crime/thriller movie for all sorts of people, it explores both sides of the coin.

I really enjoyed this. A slow burn of a story, simmering away just enough to keep you hooked. A portrayal of the isolation and desperation of people wanting to escape their own lives (for all reasons from mundanity to poverty). Some are even so desperate they are happy to lie to themselves if it means they can live in a fantasy world rather than their own. Sad, clever, human, understated. A rare gem.

Very clever and so entertaining . Couldn't keep my eyes off the screen to see what was going to happen next .Great acting from everyone involved....a first class thriller.

"Only the Animals" is a Drama - Thriller movie in which we follow the disappearance of a woman and how the lives of five people are linked to it. Each person has his/her secrets and he/she does not want to reveal them to anyone.

I liked this movie because it had a very interesting plot that contained plenty of mystery and it was well combined with drama, something that made the movie even more interesting. The direction which was made by Dominik Moll was very good and he presented very well the whole story from different perspectives without making it confusing or creating plot holes. The interpretations of Denis Ménochet who played as Michel Farange, Nadia Tereszkiewicz who played as Marion, Laure Calamy who played as Alice Farange and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi who played as Evelyne Ducat were all great and the combination of their characters fitted to the plot. In conclusion, I have to say that "Only the Animals" surprised me so, I highly recommend everyone to watch it because I am sure it will amaze you.

Been ages since I've seen a really gripping and entertaining thriller. The Devil All the Time was fantastic, but horrid topic. This is a slow quiet gem. The acting is top notch, the twist at the end, Lord, what an amazing screenplay this was.

Subtitles did not distract from this twisted plot. I remained engaged throughout. Don't question the storyline, as it's a tad improbable. It's something different, in a good way.

... mix in a dash of coincidence and serve irregularly over ice and heat for a rather unsettling French drama that may well keep you from online chat rooms if you're a...

This thriller is full of surprises. The standout is the actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. I last saw her in the Italian movie "Human Capital" in an Italian speaking role, and she gives another amazing performance this time in an entirely French speaking role. She is a very talented actress!

I wasn't sure what I was getting into, but I actually really liked this movie, but not for the reasons I thought I would.

While the literal English translation for the French title is "Only The Animals" but apparently, in French, a bête can also be a stupid person in addition to a beast/an animal; seul can mean alone. So, IMO, a more apt English title would be "The stupid lonely people"? Lol.

And the story is, in fact, about lonely people making stupid decisions in life and the consequences of those decisions. It is about the extent to which human beings go to deal with loneliness, primal/animalistic tendencies of love and sex; makes you question the moment at which human desire takes over morality and intelligence.

In most crime dramas, the 'what is being told' takes the cake. In this case, the 'what' isn't all that special, but 'HOW this story was told' blew my mind. There storytelling is non-linear, so those of you that enjoy this, surely check this one out. It's told from the perspective of five people (very tough to edit with 2-3 storylines, let alone 5) separately, and everything revolves around a single incident. I really liked how smooth the transitions were, the editing of these perspectives and how the story slowly unfolds, revealing what happened. There are various moments at which I went "Oooooh! This is why that happened back then!" It feels like a jigsaw puzzle falling into place with pieces you didn't know you had to look for. The acting in this movie was good too.

Would totally recommend this if you're looking for something new!

The trick of circular stories or vantage points has been used many times with different levels of success; Akira Kurosawa RASHOMON is perhaps the most famous of all; however in that case there were different points of view (and colours); here the story is constructed with events related to each individual character forming a whodunit. The main problem is that not everything is completely explained; leaving the second story, the most intriguing of the whole, unresolved which makes it perhaps even unnecessary. Still your interest is almost always maintained until the last two twists at the end which seem made to add a last touch of madness and the irony. There is no much that can be said without revealing the mystery. A rich woman disappear in a farmers region and almost every character is related to the events somehow. In brief; it is not a great entertainment but if you are tired of the conventional crap, this one has a lot of surprises.

As a convoluted mystery, this works pretty well on its own terms, as long as one doesn't pay too much attention to the real-world likelihood of it all. For me, there were just too many unlikely interlinkings of the characters to be credible.

As an imperialist allegory, it's OK - but would the relatively small (in French terms) savings of a farmer really be enough to transform the life of an average Ivory Coast conman as significantly as depicted? As with other commenters, I was quite taken with the early parts of this film, but towards the end of that segment, I'd started to disengage with the story and most of the characters.

Worth a look though, if you suspend disbelief enough.

This film is well directed and has a great cast, but is let down by the plotting.

At first the film gives the impression that you're going to get a murder mystery set in the wintry Massif Central giving it a familiar Scandi-Noir atmosphere. You slowly get to see the events unravel from different viewpoints, with each subsequent telling explaining one pf the previous mysteries and adding some of its own.

But then, the film lurches off into to contrivance territory. Film is not real life, and you accept that sometimes the incredible needs to happen to move a plot forward. Not everything can be a Ken Loach drama.

But "Only The Animals" has four or five unbelievable coincidences, each of which rely on astronomical odds for them to happen. And with each one, my patience frayed a little further.

Some viewers will be happy to accept these multiple million-to-one flukes, and that's fine - I'm glad they won't have their enjoyment ruined.

For me though, it was weak storytelling and it soured my entire experience. Shame - it started off so well.

I'm all for non linear timeliness when they contribute to the story telling. In this case it seems like a grafted trick. You realize early on it is non liner (that is not a spoiler it is telegraphed immediately) and the end twist is not a twist at all but obvious.

Essentially what we get is a feeble French copy of Scandinavian-noir, with the stark cold landscapes, but ultimately a predictable, sterile and shallow experience.

It is a nice little mystery. A woman disappears. Some people know some things about her, and tell the police. Others know about her, but don't say anything, to the police or to anyone else. That she has disappeared at all is very strange. What's going on?

Well, no-one except the viewer knows the whole story. Which is already somewhat unique. And the fact that what the different principals know provide us, the audience, with the complete picture by the end of the film, is bound to add to the viewer's satisfaction.

Nonetheless, there are two major coincidences...what one could call plot holes, although strictly speaking, they are not impossible.

The bigger and more consequential one has to do with the geographical location of the Marion character. She happens to be *precisely* where and when she can have the greatest impact. How likely is that? In a country of 68 million, to be hitchhiking and be seen by only a few dozen people...one of whom happens to be the one person on earth who is obsessed with her????

The second coincidence is less consequential, indeed is added on in the last few seconds of the movie as an afterthought. It can be disregarded...except in that it tells us that the filmmaker really doesn't care about such things.

Such a pity. Rather wonderful in many ways. I would still recommend it, but.

A really absorbing and unusual thriller, interconnecting the stories of five people linked to the disappearance of a woman in snowy central France. It takes time to get going but once it does, it's an intriguing and gripping tale, and quite convincingly carried through.

A woman goes missing in a small French community. The question of what happened to her is the central mystery around which this tale is woven. Along the way, we get a glimpse into the private lives - and secrets - of half a dozen of the community's inhabitants or associates.

The structure of the film has been compared to the classic Kurosawa film Rashomon, in that both tell their story through the perspective of several different characters. In Rashomon, however, essentially the same events are related through different eyes. In Only the Animals, each character experiences only part of the action, so that by the end, the viewer alone is in possession of the whole story.

This latter approach is quite innovative - certainly, it's not a narrative method that I can recall having previously encountered - and it works very well in maintaining interest. The downside is that by switching periodically between different characters, one ends up not developing much of an emotional attachment to any of them. This is in spite of the fact that they all have in common a potentially sympathetic motive - a desire to escape loneliness. The methods by which they try, however, tend to only create more problems, either for themselves or others.

The film includes a supernatural element that, presented with a little more ambiguity, could have substantially enhanced the creep factor. Rather than opting for more thrills, however, the director keeps faith with the movie's generally bleak outlook by implying an only-too-human intelligence at work.

As an aside, some reviewers have criticized the film's action as lacking credibility because of an alleged overreliance on coincidence. I think this is a misreading. The narrative structure of presenting the story from various points of view creates an *illusion* of multiple coincidences, but I think if it had been told in a more conventional manner, that impression would not arise. Indeed, I can recall only two genuine coincidences throughout, and the second is a minor one that occurs at the very end and is hardly necessary to the wider plot.

Perhaps the movie's weakest moment comes when we finally discover what happened to the missing woman. It's a very brief, unpersuasive and anticlimactic scene, indicating that perhaps action sequences are not the director's forte. Minor criticisms aside though, I would describe this as a thoughtful, innovative and well-crafted film - more a work of art than mere entertainment, though still accessible enough to have broad appeal. It surely deserved a wider audience than the one it apparently got outside its home country.

"Seules les bêtes" (a.k.a. Only the Animals) is a perfect example of 'Hyperlink Cinema'. Multiple storylines, overlapping threads, a diverse cast of characters... all converging into one terrific film. I really don't want to give anything substantial away... but half a dozen or so fascinating people surround the disappearance of one woman in the snowy mountains of France. I knew within two minutes that I was watching one of the best films of the year... and it only kept improving. This is 100% guaranteed to entertain, intrigue and thrill.

A good plot for development and a well said story.Including a very weird atmosphere just like other movies

"Oh, it's another of those 'intersecting lives' movies", you could easily say about this movie. And yes it is, in the early stages charting lives so disparate and mutually exclusive that I began to wonder whether my streaming stick had jumped channels, as they are wont to do. But no, stick with it, pay attention to all the details and you will find not a single one of them is forgotten, not a single loose end is left untied, and the whole fascinating jumble coalesces into an amazingly coherent study of human frailty and delusion that will leave you laughing darkly - as it does its biggest victim, who travels halfway across the world not to seek retribution, but simply to understand why all this torment has been visited upon him. Beautifully acted, superbly photographed, with the cultures in France and Africa vividly and sympathetically evoked, this is the cleverest film I've seen in years and certainly one of the most haunting.

The twist and turns in this movie can make you go crazy (in a good way). This was a very well thought of movie and I have to give a big salute to the directors and writers of this amazing movie. You cannot predict anything here. The joy with non-linear movies is watching the pieces come together and this movie did that beautifully. And just when you thought you knew what was going to happen in the end, you are proven wrong again. Brilliant guys.

A cleaver crime thriller with a number of Inter woven coincidences that will leave you wanting to reach in the screen and strangle the main characters by the time you reach the ending. For most of the characters there is no ending. You never find out. All of the one in a billion coincidences come to an intersection where the story focuses on the final chapter. Every one of the crew of main characters have a variety of personality dysfunctions. Only the beasts are normal which is where, I suppose, the title came from. With a little more thought and effort this film could have been much better albeit longer. It's worth watching once and that's it.

Contrary to what others suggest here, this movie doesn't start well and then deteriorate but starts out as a cliched, grotesque and quite unpleasant parade of caricatures, and later on morphs into something much more intriguing and engaging, not least for the unexpectedly clever structuring that reclaims some of the worst scenes from early on and gives them new meaning if not much more style or appeal in the second half.

The problem with this movie, in fact, is the overly long first half which does its best to repel, disgust and disappoint the viewer (so much so that many will have long given up before the nuances of the plot are brought to light). It's not giving much away to say that the oddly incongruous African opening scene does start to make sense eventually. Indeed it is the part of the movie that deals with the dark online relationship between prosperous Europe and impoverished Africa that is the most interesting element of this jumbled tale. Unfortunately the shoehorning of so much else into the plot ultimately leaves even this promising material feeling more like just another contrivance and less like anything of real importance or substance.

Whatever merits the movie possesses (and there are many, but mostly to do with execution and pacing rather than depth or empathy) the truly ludicrous ending is enough to remind you that none of these characters matters a whit in this director's search for something to distract and entertain. In the end no one in this movie is even half as real to the director as the fake online lover is to one of the central characters.