Directed by Thomas Cailley and co-written with Pauline Munier, Le Règne animal is a fantasy drama starring Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Released in theaters in October 2023 after a presentation at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, the film returns to France 2 on Sunday, December 7, 2025, at 9:10 p.m. Winner of five César Awards, it stands out as one of the most ambitious offerings in recent French cinema, combining adventure, emotion, and transformation.
In a world disrupted by the gradual appearance of animal mutations affecting certain humans, François tries to find his wife, who has been hospitalized after the first signs of transformation. When mutated creatures escape from a convoy, he takes his son Émile on a quest that leads them through the Landes, a territory that is both wild and surveilled. The film unfolds as a family story where disappearance, inheritance, and the instinct for survival intersect without revealing the final stages of the mother's journey.
Through the father-son relationship, the work explores how each person faces the unknown. Émile, a teenager in transition, confronts his own fears and a form of inner transformation fueled by the events around him. Without resolving its mysteries, the story offers a journey of initiation rooted in a realistic present where wonder and threat intertwine, transforming change into a metaphor for life's transitions.
Shot in the Landes de Gascogne region, the film stands out for its extensive search for natural settings, between industrial forests and fragments of primary forest. These landscapes become an essential part of the narrative and required meticulous location scouting, sometimes compromised by the fires in Gironde in the summer of 2022, which destroyed some of the areas planned for filming. The project mobilized a wide range of special effects techniques: makeup, animatronics, set effects, and hybrid digital animation, in order to preserve a physical embodiment of the creatures without resorting to green screens.
The tone oscillates between drama, adventure, and fantasy, with a rhythm that favors the characters' point of view. Thomas Cailley anchors the supernatural in contemporary reality, in a vein similar to certain works by Miyazaki or coming-of-age stories such as The Host. The film is thus aimed at viewers who are sensitive to hybrid universes, where emotion and the relationship with living beings take precedence over spectacular displays.
Le Règne animal (TheAnimalKingdom)
Film | 2023
Theatrical release: October 4, 2023
On television on France 2: December 7, 2025, at 9:10 p.m.
Adventure, Drama, Fantasy | Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes
By Thomas Cailley | Starring Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adèle Exarchopoulos
Original title: Le Règne animal
Nationality: France
Our opinion on The Animal Kingdom:
With fur, feathers, and scales, it has been two years since the first mutations fromhumans to animals appeared. Without attempting to explain the whys and wherefores scientifically, the film sets out to gauge the mood of a society forced to adapt to a new reality and coexist with these "creatures"—it's well known that it's never good to be (too) different.
François (Romain Duris and his eternal hippie look) and his son Émile (Paul Kircher, seen last year in Honoré's film) set out to find the mother of the family, who is in the midst of her metamorphosis, with the help of Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos, who definitively confirms her great comic talent with her offbeat performance). A convoy accident has scattered the"creatures"into the wild, sent to a specialized center in the Landes region —which has never looked so much like a Louisiana bayou, both mystical and enveloping, especially when soldiers as terrifying as the government men in E.T.'s house arrive.
A true genre film, the likes of which French cinema produces all too few—decent ones, at least— Le règne animal excels in its humor and eccentricity, but also in the scenes of physical transformation of these "creatures" that make your hair stand on end and your teeth grind. It is also, as a common thread, a very delicate coming-of-age film, like a beast licking its past wounds (the slow disappearance of a mother) and looking to the future. At the age of first loves and an irrepressible desire for freedom, Thomas Cailley doubles the narrative with the physical changes of these half-men, half-beasts who retain their human size while gradually acquiring animal attributes. We must wait for days that seem like years to find out what we will become: crocodile or gorilla, snake or owl.
A brilliant and finely crafted second film, a truly daring formal proposition that could well benefit from a sequel. The final scene, reminiscent of a Marvel post-credits scene, seems to leave the door open for other "monsters" in the not-too-distant future. So if, by chance, your teenager's bedroom starts to smell like a wild animal, ask yourself the right questions.
Offering a unique perspective on evolution, transmission, and our relationship with living things, the film combines intimacy and spectacle in a mise-en-scène that pays close attention to bodies and landscapes. This hybrid approach makes the work one of the most accomplished examples of its genre in French cinema in recent years.
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