Animal review: Ranbir Kapoor is hypnotic in ultra-violent, jaw-dropping portrayal of a problematic anti-hero

Ranbir Kapoor plays Ranvijay Balbir Singh in Animal - the hot-headed, forceful son of industrialist Balbir Singh, played by Anil Kapoor. (Screen grab/YouTube/T-Series)

There is a scene in the first half of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal, where our protagonist lays down the unsaid law of the land. Poetry and other arts, he theorises, were invented by men with weak pelvises, to make up for inferiority born from living next to men who could hunt, gather and satisfy their women. It’s a blundering assertion to make in the middle of a film, but it conveys a manifesto this sort of cinema will live and die by. For this is a film about gentlemen chauvinists, alpha men who enshrine rules by living against them. In this world there is no grand inquiry into moral good or bad, simply the evocation of a messiah complex and the deeply flawed but imposing life on the edge it translates to. It’s provocative, toe-curling violent, divisive and enrapturing.

Ranbir Kapoor is Ranvijay Balbir Singh, the hot-headed, forceful son of industrialist Balbir Singh, played by Anil Kapoor. Ranvijay’s love for his father borders on worship. Theirs is a relationship soured by ethical conundrums and feisty arguments about decency and moral turpitude. All the son wants is his father’s acknowledgment, but all he can do to become visible is create one rancorous mess after the other. It’s an untenable, but fascinating relationship. Ranvijay returns from a foreign education to marry Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna), in a fit of emotion and testosterone-fuelled pomposity. Rejected, the two step back from the Singh family, only to return years later, after a near-fatal attack on Balbir’s life. The violent son thus returns, to play both guardrail and guardian, to a household that once regarded his compass for rage and anger abhorrent. This is the animal they’ve always raised, the one they have shaped by being physically present and emotionally absent. Thus begins Ranjvijay’s transformation, the shedding of the foreskin of decency, so to speak, to become psychologically, bodily, sexually all-animal.

Directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, who knows a thing or two about courting controversy, from his Kabir Singh days, this is yet another button-pusher, the kind of unsentimental parade of ballsy, masculine glory that only someone bent on decluttering his own timeline would do. He will do him, come what may. And it makes for enthralling, nerve-jangling, at times uncomfortable viewing. This isn’t cinema that will cushion your life’s entanglements, or offer you cheap relief, but something that’ll violently pull you out of that subdued, behavioural web. A web we thicken by judgement and punishment, by playing along. There are enough metaphors about penises, sexual prowess and male virility in the film to make you twitch with discomfort. Some will call it low-brow bait to emphasise the loose-cannon symmetry of the story’s world, but within that rough texture, it also supplies a streak of comedy that most tyrannical minds seem to evidentially emanate. Maybe all madmen are essentially children with a grudge or a chip on their shoulder.

Ranbir Kapoor plays Ranvijay, a man who is torturously macho, unhinged and irredeemable. (Screen grab/YouTube/T-Series)

Animal is obviously, and unapologetically, male in its gaze and its language. The women are either protected or lusted after, as men brazenly pose around with large phallic-shaped weaponry to denounce the size of the another man’s equipment. But then, it’s done with such commitment and conviction that you see the toil behind the choreographed bloodletting, the anguish behind every drop of blood spilled for well, blood. “Rishta bnana hota hai mitti par mitti se mitti likhna. Par rishta nibhana hota hai pani par pani se pani likhna (Forming relationships is like writing in sand; maintaining them is like writing in water),” a distant cousin – one of many – that Ranvijay turns to for help, says casually yet profoundly. It’s our own that we eventually turn to, and it makes us all a bit perverse, deranged and maybe even happily blind. To which effect, Animal doesn’t just allocate violence but positions it as this decisive vocabulary of deliverance. A conversation so final, it mitigates any chance of accommodating misunderstandings. Misunderstandings that raise troubled, uncontrollable and tragically grateful sons. No wonder no one can really ever sit and talk it out anymore.

Ranbir Kapoor is abnormally good in a role that could not, not have been demanding. As a man gradually keeling over the summit of his own self-fulfilling prophecy, Ranvijay is torturously macho, unhinged and irredeemable. He’s unlikeable but also seductive in a way most literary errands run by mischief are. This is more than just an anti-hero, more than just a self-destructive monster. This is a biblical nightmare cursed to repeat itself, over and over again. As long as there are men; as long as there other are men poking their manhood.

Rashmika Mandanna and Ranbir Kapoor in director Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Animal. (Screen grab/YouTube/T-Series)

Kapoor and Vanga have given it their all. Bobby Deol’s part is unmissable in his short but impactful role as a mute vagrant, and though the film doesn’t exactly utilise Anil Kapoor’s oomph enough, this is Ranbir’s (and Vanga’s of course) show through and through.

At over three hours, Animal will test your patience, your gut and your threshold with sensitive conversations like consent, domestic violence and social etiquette. Ironically, the mercenaries in this film wear masks and bespoke suits, writing over elitist aesthetic with bareknuckle cockiness. If nothing else, this sort of cinema inspires revulsion with a passion as opposed to indifference with a polite grin. Vanga is unrepentant, at times a little too indulgent in his bro-gaze, but it’s merely the continuation of a filmography that though problematic in places, is shaking the foundational elements of our cinema. Turning it into a tool of confession for the darkest places the mind could go and probably has been since you last took breath.