REVIEW: Character Flaws Can't Derail Stylish, Shocking Animal Kingdom

When the much-discussed, total wack-job Pope finally returns to the fold, bodies begin to drop. Some are literally related to J; some are connected to him via his actions or inactions. Though he becomes the focus of both the police and his family's pressure tactics, he seems to have no sense of his own power. He remains an apt focus of some of Michôd's grandiose, Pavlovian tics (the director can't seem to get the teenager into frame without locking into a slow-motion push in on his perennially dumbstruck face), and we are meant to understand his actions retrospectively, in light of the film's final, shocking seconds. But across the preceding 100 minutes J becomes more and more unlikely -- or at least uninvolving -- as a character.

More compelling is the portrait of Melbourne itself. While it may be no Adelaide (a city whose notoriously perverse violence was immortalized in a Salman Rushdie essay; the current sport of choice there is stabbing dolphins during ocean dips), Melbourne is also not the quaint hub of Victoriana it is often portrayed to be. From the pleather and wood-paneling décor of the Cody den to the window on another life that J's middle-class girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright) provides, to the tastefully swank kitchen of the family's crooked lawyer and the scrubbed-down domain of the police precinct, Michôd focuses on interiors, the world behind the postcard-friendly facades. It's a world, as J learns, without protection, despite the semblances of comfort, and without justice.

Because Animal Kingdom is so richly suffused with atmosphere and style, you could almost float right past the deficiencies in its story in an admiring trance. Antony Partos has concocted a score that practically vibrates the screen with synthy portent. Even quotidian scenes are pumped up with layered, droning intonations of impressionistic dread, an effect that calls attention to itself as often as it simply does its job.

The above-mentioned interiors are also spaces that never quite elude the severe Melbourne sun, and Michôd makes its constant intrusion a function both of setting and suggestion. Again and again, white light floods in through windows and open doorways, often pooling on a character's shoulder, bleaching out a face, or, most ominously, gilding a body with a platinum corona. It's a measure of Michôd's unstinting command of context -- of circumstance -- that a technique generally used to connote transcendence, or heavenly benediction, by its third or fourth appearance in Animal Kingdom suggests its earthbound opposite: a chalk outline.

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