Only the Animals 2019

In a winter-painted landscape, the story unfolds through four closely linked chapters that trace the collapse of trust, desire, and illusion, beginning with a chance encounter and spiraling into a web of consequences that echo from the isolated farms of the Massif Central to a sun-baked beachfront in Sète, and finally back to the Ivory coast where a cybercrime scheme spirals toward a fateful reckoning.

In the chapter titled Alice, Laure Calamy plays Alice Farange, an insurance agent who travels to a snow-dusted sheep farm owned by Joseph Bonnefille Damien Bonnard. They greet one another with professional cordiality, seal their business, and then surrender to a passionate moment. Afterward, Alice notes that Joseph seems distracted, a tension that foreshadows the trouble to come. She returns to her own homestead—a cattle farm shared with her husband, Michel, and her father—and the blizzard warnings on the TV mingle with reports of a missing woman, Evelyne Ducat. A local gendarme, Cédric Vigier Bastien Bouillon, visits to ask questions about the case, but the Faranges stay tight-lipped even though Alice has spotted Evelyne’s abandoned car on her way home. The next day, the dynamic shifts: Alice suspects an affair, Michel confronts her, and she sees Joseph’s dog dead from a gunshot wound in the hay barn. When she returns, Michel is cryptic, then angry, and later, he disappears, leaving behind an empty car that Cedric and Alice discover.

The second chapter, centered on Joseph, reveals the farmer’s perspective as he discovers Evelyne’s corpse behind his farmhouse—the very scene Alice glimpsed earlier. He tries to move the body away but ultimately returns to the farm and constructs a hay-bale maze in the barn to shield the crime. Over the following days, Joseph talks to Evelyne in his own head, playing her music and spending nights with the imagined presence. He believes Evelyne forgives him for delaying the news of his mother’s death, and he clings to a dangerous fantasy. The dog’s barking when Evelyne’s body is disturbed draws Cedric’s suspicions during a visitation. After the dog bites at the body, Joseph shoots the animal, and the tension escalates. Realizing the risk of keeping Evelyne’s corpse in the barn, he moves it to a deep sinkhole and, in a final act of fatal resolve, follows it to his death by leaping after the body.

A shift in tone arrives with the third chapter, Marion, who appears as a young waitress in a seaside restaurant in Sète. Evelyne and Marion become lovers, and their affair deepens in Evelyne’s hotel suite. Evelyne hints that her husband accepts her secrecy, but the narrative quickly follows Marion as she chases Evelyne to a country house where the affair resumes—only to encounter resistance and distance from Evelyne. A painful moment occurs when Evelyne drives Marion to a hotel and offers money to end the arrangement; Marion declines, only to find herself unable to sustain it financially and moves to a campsite trailer. The relationship strains under Evelyne’s evasions, and a tense confrontation unfolds when Cedric visits Marion and questions her. Michel, meanwhile, shows up at the campsite, behaving seductively and calling Marion by a wrong name, Amandine, triggering a fatal moment of fear and a bloody nose for Marion as Michel flees.

The final chapter, Amandine, turns the lens to the world of online deception and cross-cultural consequences. In Abidjan, a clever but ethically murky young man, Armand Guy Roger N’Drin grows emboldened by an Internet scam that features the persona of a young European woman named Amandine. He chats with Michel under that alias, sends fake photos, and bills the scam to extract large sums of money. The sorcerer Papa Sanou blesses the operation, warning Armand to return the money when fortunes turn, and the cyberstorm intensifies as Armand ascends into nightlife, unaware of the real-world danger his deception causes. Michel, suspicious of Evelyne’s appearances near his life and haunted by the earlier disappearance, starts pressuring Armand in the real world, while Armand’s escalating gambles threaten to unravel the charade. The scam’s momentum forces a dangerous intersection with Evelyne’s world, culminating in a confrontation that leads Michel to Abidjan to confront the consequences of his own actions. Back in the narrative’s web of guilt, Armand faces a police raid, while Monique—an ex-lover connected to the scams and to Evelyne’s circle—arrives with a costly necklace and a startling revelation. The film’s final turn reveals the true puppet-master behind Monique’s “white man” and exposes the hidden, devastating link: Guillaume Ducat, Evelyne’s husband Roland Plantin, has been the unseen beneficiary behind the web of seduction, money, and deceit. In a quiet, haunting convergence, the very machinery of fraud and desire circles back to the couple’s world, exposing how far-reaching the consequences of a single secret can become.

Across its interwoven chapters, the film blends intimate, human moments with a broader meditation on trust, desire, and the fragility of moral lines. It moves with a cold, precise rhythm—from the frostbound farm and a crumbling marriage to a sunlit seaside flirtation, and finally to a distant city’s underworld economy—until the end reveals how the web of lies binds people together in ways they never anticipated. The result is a long arc of yearning and reckoning, where the characters’ choices ripple outward, shaping destinies in ways that feel inevitable yet unforeseeable, as if the snow, the sand, and the digital ether themselves conspire to expose truth through consequence.