Animal Kingdom

• • Director

    Dean Kavanagh

  • Credits

    Producer:
    Dean Kavanagh
    Anja Mahler

  • Principal Cast

    Cillian Roche
    Anja Mahler
    John Curran

• Category

  Feature
  Experimental
  

Experimental filmmaker Dean Kavanagh’s latest work is a genre-defying exploration of the cinematic apparatus. The film concerns a character (played with corporeal intensity by Cillian Roche) who happens upon a group undergoing bestial metamorphosis. Narrative is not at the forefront of what is essentially a sensory onslaught, a complex and thrilling film that is sonically and visually stunning with disturbing performances from Roche, Anja Mahler and John Curran.

A film that demands to be seen in a cinema environment, critic Fergus Daly describes it as “a film-animal, repetitively clawing out its singular territorial space.”

An exciting addition to the catalogue of underground films made by Kavanagh and colleagues over the last decade heralding a new direction in Irish cinema.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn

120 minutes, Ireland, 2017, Colour