NewsBytes Recommends: Short film 'Animal'—Unflinching exploration of domestic, child abuse
Nayla Al Khaja's short Animal, tragically based on her experiences, is a 14-minute-long portrait of melancholy, trauma, and pent-up rage. It follows a crumbling family of three: a mother, a father, and a young daughter. The father's abuse rages on, he stifles the family, and the daughter and mother wither away in silence. Sympathetic, raw, and also courageous, it's available on Netflix.
How the opening scene sets the stage for the narrative
The first scene, set at night, lends the film a stunning, monochromatic feel and ejects several emotions. The night may mean relief and silence for some, but it is also a harbinger of doom because the uncertainty and precariousness of darkness threaten to swallow people whole. For the mother, it's the latter, because when the sun goes down, the demon comes up.
Few dialogues, but the actions are still effective
The dialogue-sparse movie takes separate incidents to whip up the father's horror. He's unnamed because he is a microcosm and there are several like him; nobody in the house makes eye contact with him, and his torture machinations involve asking his wife to turn the light off and on. The house is huge, but it's filled with silence—It, too, is a character. Equally scarred.
Its ending fills you with hope
Toward the end, when the girl realizes that her father has done something unthinkable and figuratively ceased to be a human, she finally breaks the shackles of subjugation. She sobs, cries, and finally screams, and while it may not feel much, it signals that she's garnering courage, and though we don't see it onscreen, we know that she'll take down her father one day.
Watch it on Netflix today
The film effectively underscores both the physical and psychological impact of domestic abuse and how unbridled patriarchy, coupled with toxic masculinity, wreaks havoc behind closed doors. The short comes full circle when you realize how even the slightest sound invites the man's wrath, but eventually, it's the daughter's scream that foretells the shift in power structures. Even well-fortified castles fall one day, after all.
