Critics reviews

In a powerful shot of Aridjis’s face in a foggy bathroom vanity, her feral beauty appears uncannily like Carrington’s own in an early self-portrait. Indeed, the riddle of Aridjis’s absorbing performance lies in its ambiguity of purpose: Has she been cast in a vulnerable character study or a winking metanarrative on sexual mores?

The film’s provocative multiplicity attests to a state of flux in identity, dreams, and sexuality. Attending to modes of irrationality, Appignanesi composes a sincere yet frightful evocation of female psychology and the broad horizon that is the anatomy of desire, comparable to Paul Verhoeven’s work in Elle (2016) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016).

The way Aridjis’ father is photographed at the end of the phone is reminiscent of a James Bond villain. It’s a surprising, elegiac film with a thumping soundtrack by Andy Cooke that works by stoking interest in both Carrington and Aridjis, since it does not intellectualise about their lives, but rather creates a fantasy psycho-docudrama. Documentary surreality, if you will.

Josh Appignanesi’s new film is a knowing blend of the assured and the amateurish which understands its place in cinema history, and consequently has a lot of fun playing around in it.

Director Josh Appignanesi refuses to accept the usual tropes of the fact seeking genre – ditching the familiar talking heads and transparent filming process – to dive down a rabbit hole where reality becomes indistinguishable from surreality.

Filmed on antique video (specifically, 1986 AG-450 VHS camera), Female Human Animal is part documentary, part fevered dream; a haunting, at times psycho-sexual, thrilling journey transgressing internal and external worlds.

Appignanesi’s film makes a bold bid to shake us up, using a 1986 VHS camera that gives us an engaging and pleasantly dated viewing quality.