Critics reviews

People choosing their partners over their friends is nothing new, but what separates this film from the flourishing women-behaving-badly subgenre is that Tyler and Laura are everything to each other.

The more it goes on, the more obvious it becomes that Animals is a film made by women who've lived through this (or something like this)... Hyde and Unsworth do audiences the favour of introducing two women who... actually, properly like one another, but they have the smarts to see they're not alike.

If Animals does not answer the question it asks – why do the choices available to women remain so prescriptive? – its willingness to question and re-imagine what a happy ending looks like is in itself satisfying.

Like [the friends'] well-rehearsed routine of anarchic nights out and bleary comedowns, the film’s structure is untidily elliptical... preoccupied [as it is] with the theme of growing up, fizzing with the teenage energy of a coming-of-age movie despite its characters edging into their 30s.

Once upon a time, tracking messy friendships between quote-unquote badly behaved, self-destructive females felt revolutionary... Animals feels like a step backwards, not least because director Sophie Hyde never creates a solid sense of place.

A scathing and heartfelt coming of age drama, though not of the adolescent kind... Holliday Grainger delivers a mercurial portrait of a woman floundering her way to some sort of self-knowledge, but not before taking every possible wrong turn.

The novel’s pivotal interior voice has almost entirely gone and instead we are treated to endless scenes of our protagonists downing cheap wine, with little of the sensitive background commentary... [Grainger] delivers everything she can... in an admirable attempt, ultimately fruitless, to breathe life into a corpse.

What’s impressive about Hyde’s film is that the freewheeling style of the storytelling matches the wildly contradictory thought process of Laura... [Animals] stalks and teases before unleashing its efficient, razor-sharp claws.

Hyde’s drama has enough energy to compensate for the film’s many implausibilities... [Her film] is buoyed by plenty of zingers, Shawkat’s comic timing, and Bryan Mason’s sleek cinematography... But, in common with Laura and Tyler, Animals is a bit too freewheeling for its own good.

The story’s snapshot-series structure is light and unforced, with Hyde’s sensitive sequences and Grainger’s delicate playing toning down the book’s broad comedy.

Animals treats its subjects with patience and generosity... Without ever explicitly stating it, Hyde’s direction plants the idea that these women are holding on so fiercely to their friendship because it’s one of the only ways they can really define themselves.

Irreverent, funny and refreshingly unsentimental, Hyde's sophomore drama gives Withnail & I a bawdy run for its money thanks to a nuanced script (from source novelist Emma Jane Unsworth) and believable lead performances that put flawed but fascinating women up front and centre.