Ben Affleck’s Crime Thriller Animals Arrives on Netflix to a Cold First Wave of Reviews

Animals is on Netflix today, and the first reviews did not do it a favor. Ben Affleck directs and stars in the crime thriller, which Netflix releases on October 9 alongside a limited theatrical run. He plays Mark Kimball, a wealthy independent candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. On Halloween, kidnappers take his preteen son, Denny, and demand $7 million. Most of the money has already gone into the campaign. Kimball and his wife, Abigail, played by Kerry Washington, have hours to find it and, in the film’s telling, to expose a side of their life they did not intend to show. Gillian Anderson, Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, and Ray Fisher fill out the company. The film is rated R and runs 106 minutes. The tagline on the listing is “Power can’t protect you.” It is Affleck’s sixth feature as director, produced through Artists Equity, the company he founded with Matt Damon and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, with Makeready and Fifth Season. Matt Damon is a producer. Robert Elswit shot it. William Goldenberg and Christopher Rouse cut it. Harry Gregson-Williams scored it. Principal photography started in Los Angeles on March 7, 2025. The script is by Affleck, Connor O. McIntyre, and Billy Ray. What the Early Reviews Are Saying The aggregator numbers, a day before wide availability, are poor. Rotten Tomatoes had 38 percent positive from 16 reviews, averaging 5.3 out of 10. Metacritic had 31 from 11 reviews: one positive, six mixed, four negative. That is a generally unfavorable score, and it is a small sample. Both can move. Neither is starting from a place Netflix can quote. The split inside that sample is the useful part. Variety’s Guy Lodge called it a nasty, compulsive kidnapping thriller, most interesting when it is most cynical, and said a direct-to-Netflix release was the right home for slick, pacy pulp that would still hold a multiplex. IGN, the high mark on Metacritic at 80, said Affleck keeps the emphasis on the characters’ flawed humanity. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney found the elements — a campaign, a kidnapping, class unease between staff and employers — and a movie that “too rarely shows its teeth.” The bottom line there was that it will play fine on Netflix in the background while dinner is made. The Guardian called it dull, listless, and anonymous, a film that wants frictionless likability and does not ask why. The complaints cluster. Tepid adultery. A marital argument that does not earn the runtime. Political maneuvering described as pedestrian. An outcome reviewers found cynical in a way that surprised no one. The praise clusters on pace, on Elswit’s Los Angeles, and on the moments the film is willing to be mean about money. Affleck has been here before as a director: Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo, Live by Night, Air. Argo won best picture. Animals is the first of the six built as a Netflix original, and the reviews are treating it as one. The Story It Is Selling Netflix’s own frame is the campaign and the clock. Mark Kimball, in the trailer, says a crisis shows who you are. The glittering version — successful politician, father, husband to Washington’s Abigail — cracks when Denny is taken. The ransom is more than they have liquid. The hours are the movie. Affleck has said he wanted to use the audience’s expectations of him, of Washington, and of Yeun, then drift off them. Yeun plays Sam Allison. Anderson plays Dayle Burton. The staff-and-employer thread is the class note several reviews said was present and underused. A kidnapping plot against a mayoral campaign is not a new skeleton. The film’s bet is that the embellishments — what the couple will do, and what the campaign was already hiding — are the movie. Reviewers who liked it thought the cynicism was the point. Reviewers who did not thought the cynicism was borrowed and the characters were not. Why Netflix, and Why Today Artists Equity has been Affleck and Damon’s attempt to make films with the cast and crew sharing in the upside. Air, their Nike drama, was the proof of concept and went through Amazon. Animals is the crime film, and it is on Netflix, with a select theatrical date on the same Friday. Variety’s critic thought the streaming window was the correct one. A 106-minute R-rated thriller with this cast is exactly the kind of title Netflix programs for a Friday, when a theatrical crime film would be fighting for screens in October. The score is the risk. A 38 percent Tomatometer is not fatal on Netflix — the service does not live on opening-weekend multiples — but it is fatal to the “event” framing. The audience score is not up yet. That number, not the 16-review critic sample, is what will decide if Animals sits in the top ten next week or drops out of the row. What to Watch Whether the Tomatometer moves once the review count leaves the teens. The Netflix top-ten rank through the weekend. How the limited theatrical engagements do in Los Angeles and New York. Whether Affleck treats the reception as a Netflix experiment or as a director’s setback. Any awards path, which the early scores make unlikely. Animals is on Netflix today. Affleck directs, Affleck stars, and the son of a Los Angeles mayoral candidate is the ransom. The first reviews call it efficient pulp or a dull copy of better films, and the aggregators are closer to the second. The audience gets the movie anyway. That is the Netflix deal. Digital8Hub will note the weekend rank and any move in the critic scores.