Animals, the Ben Affleck-led Netflix thriller released on October 9, has drawn attention for its reported use of AI tools in production. The technology is said to have been used for relighting, but it is not readily apparent in the finished film, including during its action scenes.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, the front-running candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. On Halloween, kidnappers demand $7 million after taking the child of the Kimball household. Mark has money, but not enough accessible cash to meet the ransom, pushing him toward a fixer played by Gillian Anderson.
The premise initially follows familiar kidnapping-thriller territory, but the central reveal changes the stakes: the abducted child is Hector, the son of the family’s handyman, Ramon Valle. Ramon is undocumented in the United States, and Mark’s calculation over whether to help becomes entangled with the electoral value of Latino voters.
Kerry Washington plays Mark’s wife, whose unhappy marriage and affair add pressure to the campaign’s carefully managed public image. A divorce could damage Mark politically, leaving the couple bound together by more than their relationship. Steven Yeun appears as Mark’s political adviser, though the character is given limited screen time.
Animals builds tension around phone calls with the kidnappers, a deteriorating marriage and the possibility of an inside conspiracy. It ultimately avoids the expected reveal that the kidnapping is a scam orchestrated by people close to Mark, while later action sequences take on a heightened, video game-like quality.
The film’s immigration-policy references give its political story some contemporary weight, but its broader plotting remains conventional and its final stretch leans toward familiar Hollywood thriller resolutions. Affleck is effective under pressure, although some of Mark’s rapid shifts into anger feel abrupt. For viewers tracking Hollywood’s AI experiments, the more notable point is that Animals offers little obvious evidence of its reported AI-assisted relighting in the final image.
