“My head is an animal...,” goes a line in a famous song from the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men. Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s protagonists — thick-headed creatures of privilege and entitlement — are all badly-behaved men who could easily pass for monsters. After Arjun Reddy (2017) and Kabir Singh (2019), two films about a chain-smoking doctor with anger issues, the director returns with Animal, his second Hindi feature, about a chain-smoking engineer with deep-seated daddy issues. Yet no matter how bleak and paleolithic his view of human instincts, he also wants us to stand in awe of his heroes, even admire and empathise with them.
Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor) is a rich Delhi brat who grows up idolising his father, industrialist Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor). Balbir is stern and emotionally unavailable, which messes up Ranvijay’s circuitry from childhood. He steals away from school for his dad’s birthday; years later, when his own brother-in-law addresses Balbir as ‘papa’, he gets angry and territorial. Familial terms annoy him in a general sense too — for instance, his childhood crush Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) calling him ‘bhaiya’ (brother) publicly. Now a grown man, with a bike and bun mullet, he commands Geetanjali to break off her engagement with another dude and marry him instead. It’s unexplained why Geetanjali responds so fast (perhaps she has watched Kabir Singh and understands the consequences if she doesn’t).
Ranvijay and Geetanjali emigrate to the US, raise two kids, spend their initial marital life in unaltered bliss; not a glimpse of which Vanga has the patience or delicacy to show. His films are charged and propelled by twisted notions of love, but he has no real knack for the mechanics of love stories. Even a simple romantic interlude, without a tease or a snub or an unprovoked sexual boast, becomes too difficult for the director and his co-writers Pranay Reddy Vanga and Saurabh Gupta to handle. Instead, they cut directly to six years after, when Balbir is shot by unidentified assailants on a golf course. Returning home post-haste, Ranvijay, now a bearded brute, takes charge, his intentions to fortify his family’s safety clashing with his all-consuming thirst for revenge.
