Animals

2014


Directed by
Collin Schifli
Produced by
Mary Pat Bentel & Chris Smith
Edited by
Amanda Griffin
Consulting Editor
Barry Poltermann

SXSW Film Festival
Dramatic Feature, Winner

Bobbie and Jude are a young couple living in their broken-down car parked alongside Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. Their days are a continuous ritual of theft and scoring until they must confront the difficult truth of their relationship after one of them is hospitalized.

By letting the troubles creep in, Schiffli’s accomplished first feature makes (their) conundrum both accessible and intimately unsettling at once.

Eric Kohn
IndieWire

The details ring true and the performances are compelling in this indie drama. Dastmalchian and Shaw are thoroughly convincing both as vividly drawn, emotionally complex individuals…

Joe Leydon
Variety

Dastmalchian and Shaw are both dynamite, fusing into an instantaneous chemistry that’s constantly alive… Animals is a bold and assured debut from a fresh voice, that of Collin Schiffli.

Matt Barone
Complex Magazine

David Dastmalchian and Kim Shaw are terrific… A grippingly gritty and bleak film – and all the better for not puling its punches.

Mark Adams
Screen Daily

Grimy and sad but not sensationalistic, the debut feature is like Drugstore Cowboy drained of its hipness and sex appeal…

John DeFore
The Hollywood Reporter

A love story about two highly relatable, flawed characters struggling to make it work. You can’t help but root for them.

Ashley Moreno
The Austin Chronicle

…a character study that reminds me of the first time I saw Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. And it could eventually herald the arrival of as important a talent.

Brian Tallerico
Film Threat

A lucid, psychologically complex depiction of a path to redemption.

Nick McCarthy
Slant Magazine