Concrete Playground

Although reincarnation seems appealing if you were to you come back as, say, a lion, it's perhaps slightly less so when you consider that you might end up a cockroach. This is the story of Animal Kingdom: a pitiful tale of someone who had the misfortune to end up where no-one deserves to be. Our cockroach here is J (James Frecheville), a pubescent and generally unappealing young man. When his heroin-addict mother dies, the only person he can think to call is his grandmother, Smurf (Jacki Weaver), the grand dame of an underworld family. Drawn by default into a life of criminality, J quickly becomes caught up in a showdown between corrupt cops and his not-so-innocent relations. Forced to recognise his status as a little fish in a huge pond by a mustachioed senior cop — aka Guy Pearce looking straight off the set of Crime Investigation Australia — J makes tough decisions in order to survive.

James Frecheville is chillingly convincing portraying J's naive, blase acceptance and cleverly resists presenting the character in a more complex, empathetic light than is necessary. The cinematography and the soundtrack to this film are exceptional, working with the slow pace of the film's beginning to make this 'not just another Aussie crime drama'. Beyond the halfway mark, however, the film begins to fall into the same traps: while tension still runs high, a strange combination of too cinematic and too 'real' makes the plot slightly unconvincing. Nevertheless, Animal Kingdom is an unusually stylish crime flick.