BHFF Review: ANIMALE - Bold Feminist Horror Unleashes the Beast Within

Image courtesy of IMBD

By Tom Milligan

Feminist body horror has been having something of a moment lately, with Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance performing well critically and commercially this year. Whereas Fargeat’s sophomore feature is a satirical send-up of beauty standards, Emma Benestan’s ANIMALE is a different beast altogether. Here, she introduces the audience to a world seldom seen on the big screen: the thrilling and deadly sport of bull racing. 

In rural France, Najma (Oulaya Amamra) works at a ranch that hosts a local bull racing competition. When we first meet her, she’s still figuring out the ropes. After a day of herding the animals, she’s required to brand one of the bulls so that it can officially participate in the games. Bullriding and bullfighting are both world-famous, but this is its own unique variation.

In bull racing, contestants enter an arena and must successfully remove one of the winning attributes from a bull’s horns, such as a tassel, to be declared the victor. It requires equal parts grace and agility, with the runners often leaping acrobatically into the rafters to escape potential injury. These sequences are particularly exciting to watch and seemingly well-realized and researched. 

When Najma expresses an interest in competing, she is met with hesitation by her colleagues. After all, this is a male-dominated sport and would mark Najma as the first woman in the town’s history to participate in a race. Her mother expresses concern as well. “What happens if you’re gored in the stomach and can’t have children?” She asks her daughter. This doubt merely fuels Najma’s determination to enter the arena for herself, hoping she can be seen as an equal by her peers. 

We follow along as she trains and learns more about the profession's intricacies, bringing us to her first race. After a rocky first attempt, Najma and the other racers celebrate at a local watering hole. “For a girl, you did good for your first try.” Remarks such as this visibly cut deep, but she’s unfortunately grown used to them.

After drinking and dancing, the group heads to the pasture to visit the bulls. Under the influence of alcohol and egged on by the others, Najma hops over the fence to get closer to the animals. After falling and hitting her head, she wakes up in bed the next morning and can’t remember what happened the rest of the night. 

Here is where things start to get strange. Some of the employees on the ranch start turning up dead days later. Everyone assumes that one of the bulls has gone rogue, but Najma suspects otherwise. Something’s been off since that blurry night. She’s been waking up in strange places, sometimes covered in blood. She also feels a connection to the animals on a psychic level, experiencing their emotions and feeling their pain. 

We begin to wonder if we have a “werebull” situation on our hands, as does Najma. Body horror is all about transformation, and ANIMALE is at its most powerful when it uses this device as a means of processing a woman’s trauma in a patriarchal environment. It’s structurally coherent and, therefore, easy to follow, but that makes for an experience that can also be easy to predict.

There is a “twist” that arrives at the third act that also left me questioning its inclusion. It further emphasizes Najma’s rage, but this narrative could have taken a different direction or even existed without it. Performances here are excellent across the board, and the whole thing looks and sounds quite gorgeous. Benestan has an empathetic eye for both Najma’s character and the animals on screen, whose journeys can be viewed as parallel and merge into a memorable ending and final image. 

The journey to get to that ending can feel familiar, with its plot not always able to match the unique setting and atmosphere. French body horror aficionados might find themselves on its wavelength, and though this is not Benestan’s first rodeo, it makes her a filmmaker to watch out for.

ANIMALE had its East Coast premiere at the 2024 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.