Recently landing on Netflix, Ben Affleck thriller Animals has eerie similarities to a film by Akira Kurosawa and its 2025 Spike Lee remake. NB: The following contains spoilers for Animals. Ben Affleck really wants you to know that Mark Kimball is a good guy. The opening credits for Animals, the new Netflix thriller feature that ... Animals on Netflix | When is a remake not a remake?
Recently landing on Netflix, Ben Affleck thriller Animals has eerie similarities to a film by Akira Kurosawa and its 2025 Spike Lee remake.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Animals.
Ben Affleck really wants you to know that Mark Kimball is a good guy. The opening credits for Animals, the new Netflix thriller feature that Affleck wrote, directed and stars in, gives us a crash course in who this Los Angeles one-percenter is.
Kimball may be a successful attorney with a massive house and a picturesque family, but he’s stil a man of the people: he came from humble working class roots, worked as a teacher, fought in the Gulf War, moved into a legal career involving environmental issues, and now wants to run as LA’s mayor. (Presumably, he never sleeps.)
Animals’ opening few minutes show flashes of Kimball’s mayoral campaign, as he goes around, Zohran Mamdani-style, meeting and talking to ordinary LA residents for filmed bits on social media. But it’s almost as though Affleck wants to sell Kimball to an audience who might narrow their eyes at this rich, white middle-aged protagonist showing up in a 2026 thriller: don’t worry, the introductory montage seems to say; Kimball may be unfeasibly wealthy, but he’s still basically a stand-up guy.
Or is it all an overwrought smokescreen? Is Kimball, beneath his stage-managed persona and slickness, some kind of monstrous animal hinted at in the film’s title? David Fincher’s Gone Girl brilliantly played with Affleck’s Hollywood star aura to create Nick Dunne, a character we were never sure we could entirely trust. Maybe Animals, the latest in a string of Affleck-directed thrillers that includes Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Live By Night, will explore similar lines.
Instead, Animals emerges as a deeply strange thriller with far less on its mind than it first appears. As a recent interview with GQ proved, Affleck’s a smart chap, but Animals seems to have gotten away from him somewhat. It’s a thriller whose set-up positively screams ‘whodunnit’, but never satisfactorily pays off who actually did the crimes.
What’s also a mystery is its glaring resemblance to a recent Spike Lee thriller – though we’ll get back to that in more detail shortly.
First: the thriller bit of the plot. It’s Halloween, and the pivotal moment in Mark Kimball’s mayoral bid – an independent campaign into which he’s poured his family’s savings. But as Kimball frets over his dwindling finances and a decisive public appearance that could decide whether or not he wins the votes of LA’s Latin-American community, he receives a horrifying phone call. A disguised voice on the other end of the line claims to have kidnapped Kimball’s young son, Denny. If Kimball doesn’t stump up a $7m ransom, then the boy’s dead.
The problem, of course, is that Kimball is too broke to pay up – a revelation that doesn’t go down at all well with his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington). Amid the panic, Kimball’s campaign organiser, Sam (Steven Yeun) comes up with a suggestion: he knows a mysterious figure calling herself Dayle (Gillian Anderson) who can help people out in tight situations such as these.
Dayle, who’s ferried around in a chauffeur-driven luxury SUV like some kind of crime lord, shows up a few minutes later. Walking frostily into Kimball’s living room, she agrees to come up with the $7m, but demands a 20 percent fee on top, and takes Kimball’s posh house as collateral. Kimball, in no position to bargain, agrees.
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Then comes wrenching twist (we did warn you about spoilers): the kidnapper messed up, and snatched the son of Kimball’s housekeeper by mistake. After a brief moment of jubilation, Kimball then realises that he’s still in hock to the shadowy Dayle – and that he needs her help to retrieve the housekeeper’s son.
If all this sounds familiar, then that’s because the set-up is exactly the same as Spike Lee’s thriller Highest 2 Lowest, which came out in 2025. In that film, Denzel Washington played a wealthy New York record company owner in the middle of his own financial woes: he just used his own luxury pad as a down-payment to prevent his firm from being snapped up by a rival.
In the middle of this, Washington’s character, David King, gets a phone call from a kidnapper who claims to have snatched his teenage son. As King scrambles around to get the ransom money together, he discovers that the kidnapper took the wrong kid – they instead took the son of his chauffeur, played by Jeffrey Wright.
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime classic, High And Low, which has broadly the same plot but follows a rich businessman who mortgages his house to gain control of a shoe factory. The film was adapted from the 1959 Ed McBain thriller, King’s Ransom – a thriller also used as the basis for an episode of 60s TV series 87th Precinct and Steven Soderbergh’s 2023 series, Full Circle.
The story of a botched kidnapping and a protagonist’s moral quandary is over 60 years old, in other words, and Animals is so close to those earlier plots that it could almost be regarded as an unofficial remake. What’s obvious, given the proximity of Highest 2 Lowest and Animals in release terms, is how incomplete and mishapen Affleck’s film feels.
Like Highest 2 Lowest, Animals’ opening act dangles the possibility that the kidnapper has some connection to the protagonist’s family. Kimball’s wife is having an affair with a teacher (Ray Fisher) who could, we might imagine, be engineering the kidnapping to disrupt Kimball’s campaign. Kimball’s housekeeper, Cecilia (Adriana Paz) or perhaps her boyfriend, Ramon (Luis Gerardo Mendez) might have something to do with it. Or could Sam, Kimball’s campaign organiser who clearly has criminal connections of some sort, have engineered the whole thing as an attempt to make his boss go viral?
Incredibly, Animals pays absolutely none of this off; the kidnappers are just kidnappers, and Affleck doesn’t dwell on their identities – they spend much of the third act clad in bunny masks. Nor do we ever learn anything much about Gillian Anderson’s Dayle, who becomes a loose end that is hurriedly tied up with a single bullet.
The quandary presented in High And Low and Highest 2 Lowest doesn’t amount to much in Animals, either. In those films, the protagonist has to choose between his business ambitions and the morally correct decision to pay the ransom that will save a child’s life.
In Animals, Kimball is backed into such a corner that he really has no choice in the matter: he’s already paid Dayle for her services, and if voters found out that he’d refused to help a working-class, Latin-American kid in trouble, his reputation would be ruined.
Seemingly conscious of this, Affleck and co-writers Connor O McIntyre and Billy Ray ring the changes and give Kimball another dilemma: Dayle can have the kidnappers killed, but Kimball will have to live with the knowledge of this forever – not to mention that evidence of his involvement could become public and ruin him at any time.
Again, though, this life-changing decision fails to generate much suspense: that Kimball will resort to sanctioning violence feels like an inevitablity, given the stakes, and the whole third act is tight up so neatly that we barely have time to question just how low Kimball has stooped to put his life back on track. (The amount of after-the-fact exposition it takes to explain how Kimball covered up the affair is almost comically huge.)
With Animals failing to meaningfully engage with the subjects of class or the value of human life – which Lee’s film tries to, as flawed as its writing is – it comes across as a bizarre misfire from a filmmaker who’s normally adept at making these kinds of thrillers. So what happened?
As Affleck himself acknowledged in a September interview with Entertainment Weekly, the story behind Animals is a long and unusually interesting one. It was originally supposed to star his old friend Matt Damon in the Kimball role, with Affleck’s ex-wife Jennifer Garner playing Kimball’s significant other, Abigail.
Then, a matter of days before shooting was set to begin in 2024, Affleck abruptly put the production on hold. The reason? Affleck had belatedly gotten wind of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest.
Said Affleck, “We get very close to shooting, and then somebody said to me, ‘Hey, you know, there’s this other movie that Spike [Lee] and Denzel [Washington] are doing that’s about a kidnapping. And I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”
Affleck also discovered that Highest 2 Lowest was a remake of High And Low – a film he said he hadn’t seen. All of this was, at any rate, enough to convince Affleck to pull the plug on Animals – at least temporarily. Matt Damon went off to make The Odyssey, and Garner, long story short, bowed out as well.
The sensible creative decision might have been to leave Animals there, but Affleck couldn’t leave it alone. “I was like, God, this is really sticking with me,” he said, “and I actually wanna do this.”
Affleck then went ahead and made Animals anyway, but argues that his film has enough points of difference to distinguish it from Lee and Kurosawa’s thrillers.
“What I’m really interested in is something wholly apart from, I think, what these other movies are dealing with,” he told EW. “I think it’s different enough, at least from what I understand about those movies, that this will be judged on its own merits, frankly.”
Given the decidedly mixed reviews that Animals has gotten so far, it’s probably safe to say that Animals is indeed being judged on its own merits. Even setting aside the plot similarities discussed so far, the film has a flat, Netflix-y look; a few days ago, Affleck said that he’d used AI in Animals’ production, but wouldn’t say where. As it turns out, the look of the finished piece is so generic that working out what’s auto-generated and what isn’t becomes a moot point.
Some aerial shots might be gen-AI; a really weird moment involving a boy rolling down a hill looks janky enough to be AI-generated (it’s already becoming a meme); to be honest, even Gillian Anderson’s hair looks architectural to be some kind of visual effect.
Animals is a distinctly middling straight-to-streaming film, then, which wouldn’t be surprising if it wasn’t for the talent of the people working on it. Even now, there are so many unanswered questions, both about the film’s plot and its making. How did a script so obviously close to an existing thriller get so far into production before the similarities were noticed?
To what extent was the script reworked once those similarities came to life? That Animals labours to set so much up and then fails to pay any of it off suggests to this writer that the third act was once very different. In an interview with Screenrant, Affleck gave similar comments to EW, but hinted that tehre was an “incarnation of the movie [that] just went away”, and that what ended up on our screens is less about the kidnapping and more about “the real nature of marriage.”
It may be some time before we learn what the original intentions were for Animals, and whether it changed all that drastically after its similarities to Highest 2 Lowest were discovered. Until then, it remains one of the year’s most fascinating misfires.
Animals is streaming now on Netflix.
