Everyone in this film is in dire need of love â and it makes them do crazy things
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(M) 116 minutes
Thereâs an old law of screenwriting that says you can only have one coincidence per movie, otherwise the audience wonât trust you. What that means, in effect, is that a writer canât monkey with causality. If fate, chance or the hand of God is running things, the outcome is âpredestinedâ. The Greeks and Shakespeare loved that, but modern drama requires more uncertainty.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (left) and Nadia Tereszkiewicz in Only the Animals.
In fact, every writer knows that monkeying with causality is part of what they do, in order to manipulate uncertainty. Dominik Moll and co-writer Gilles Marchand certainly know it; they take coincidence to an extreme here, taunting us with their manipulations. The question is why?