A kidnapper’s demand usually tests how much a parent can pay. Animals, the crime thriller Ben Affleck directs and stars in for Netflix, asks something harder of Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son has just been taken: how much of his own life he is willing to let people see to get the boy back. The money is part of the problem, because most of it has already gone into the campaign. The larger bill is everything he and his wife have kept out of view.

The premise, as Netflix lays it out, is compact. Mark (Affleck) and his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), have a few hours to raise a ransom for their son, Denny, played by Christopher Woodley. Short on cash, they have to get their hands dirty and expose a side of their lives they never meant to bring into the open. The official logline goes further: the couple are drawn into a web of deception, and the choices they make to raise the payment could tear their world apart. The tagline is four words long, and it states the thesis plainly: Power can’t protect you.

The casting that points to where the film is headed is Gillian Anderson. She plays Dayle, a fixer, and the promotion around the film presents her as the person who makes it clear to the Kimballs that their son’s survival depends on dropping the pretenses. That puts a professional manager of secrets at the center of a story about a family that has been arranged for public consumption. It also hands Kerry Washington a strange mirror. For seven seasons of Scandal, Washington was Olivia Pope, the crisis manager who made powerful people’s problems disappear. In Animals she sits on the other side of the desk, a candidate’s wife whose own secrets are what is being negotiated.

Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Ray Fisher, Matt Gerald and Mark Kassen complete the ensemble. Netflix has not spelled out most of their roles, and for a ransom thriller that silence is useful: the genre depends on the audience not knowing who, in a candidate’s orbit, has something to gain. Yeun comes to the film after Beef, the Netflix series that won him an Emmy. Paz comes from Emilia Pérez, whose four lead actresses shared the best actress prize at Cannes. Méndez is best known to Netflix audiences from Club de Cuervos, and Fisher last shared a screen with Affleck in Justice League.

For Affleck, the material is a return. His first film as a director, Gone Baby Gone, was also built around a missing child, a four-year-old girl who vanishes from a Boston neighborhood, and it treated the search as a moral test for the adults around her rather than a race against the clock. The films that followed, The Town, Argo, Live by Night and Air, moved through a bank-robbery crew, a CIA extraction and a sneaker deal. Animals is his first feature behind the camera since Air, and it brings him back to the abduction story with one change that alters everything: the parent at the center is running for office, so every choice he makes to save his son is also a choice about what the city will learn.

The team around him signals a streaming thriller built with theatrical ambitions. Robert Elswit, who won an Oscar for shooting There Will Be Blood and photographed Los Angeles after dark in Nightcrawler, is the cinematographer. William Goldenberg, an Oscar winner for editing Argo, cuts the film with Christopher Rouse, who won for The Bourne Ultimatum. Harry Gregson-Williams writes the score, and Trish Summerville designs the costumes. The screenplay began with Connor O. McIntyre and was revised by Affleck and Billy Ray, the writer of Captain Phillips, another story in which a ransom is negotiated against a clock.

The production took a winding road. Animals was first announced with Matt Damon in the lead and Affleck directing, as a project for Artists Equity, the studio the two actors founded with Gerry Cardinale. Scheduling pushed the shoot back, and when the film came together again Affleck took the role of Mark Kimball himself, with Washington opposite him. Damon stayed on as a producer alongside Brad Weston, Dani Bernfeld and Collin Creighton, with Makeready and Fifth Season also behind the film. Cameras rolled in Los Angeles, the city the story is set in.

The setup reads as a portrait of a particular American figure: the candidate whose family is part of the pitch. A campaign sells steadiness, and a household that looks settled is part of the product. The synopsis suggests that a kidnapping is the one crisis image management cannot absorb, because the kidnapper, not the campaign, sets the terms and the deadline. The trailer leans on the urgency of the ransom. The synopsis leans on something slower, the things the couple have been hiding from each other. How the film balances those two engines will decide whether Animals plays as a clean ransom procedural or as a marriage drama with a gun on the table.

That is also where the title lands. The synopsis frames the ransom as a process that drags into the open a side of the Kimballs’ lives they never meant anyone to see, and the word Animals names what people turn into once the polish is gone. Whatever happens to Denny, the question the premise leaves hanging is what a family has left once it has shown the city, and each other, what it was prepared to do to protect the picture.

What to know before you press play

Is Animals a movie or a series? A feature film, not a series, so the whole story arrives at once.

When and where can I watch it? On Netflix from October 9, 2026, with a release in select theaters the same day.

Who directed it? Ben Affleck, who also stars and wrote the screenplay with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray.

Kerry Washington and Ben Affleck face to face in the Netflix film Animals — Kerry Washington and Ben Affleck in Animals. Photo: Netflix

Who is in the cast? Ben Affleck as Mark Kimball, Kerry Washington as his wife Abigail, Gillian Anderson as the fixer Dayle, plus Steven Yeun, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Ray Fisher, Matt Gerald, Mark Kassen and Christopher Woodley as the kidnapped son, Denny.

Who produced it? Artists Equity, the studio Affleck founded with Matt Damon and Gerry Cardinale, with Makeready and Fifth Season.