Director Dominik Moll (Lemming) elevates the familiar multiple story line genre with remarkable finesse in Only the Animals, a pursuit of four adults struggling in rural France—along with a young man in the Ivory Coast—who each wittingly or not play a part in a woman’s violent death along a mountain road. Moll skillfully shifts the action so we think we can read what’s happening in many crucial scenes, only to replay the scenes with important new details that change our whole understanding of what we thought we knew. The film’s impact goes way beyond clever plot manipulation as Moll touches a nerve with painful glimpses into the souls of his lost characters. In this movie, unrequited love is a bomb, with the power to destroy lives and even wipe them out. 

After an intriguing opening sequence set in Abidjan, the camera follows social worker Alice (Laure Calamy) as she drives her car along snowy roads through the southern French mountains. We can see she’s in a state of high expectation, and when she reaches a remote farm, we know why: Alice immediately plunges into grasping, needy sex with her withdrawn client (Damien Bonnard). The closed-off farmhand seems less than engaged. Alice notices his mind is elsewhere, and when she goes home to her indifferent, distracted husband, Michel (???Denis Ménochet, who played another toxic male in Custody), he dismisses her attempts to connect on the pretext of going over the farm’s accounts. Alice wants to be at the center of these two men’s worlds, but both are deeply preoccupied with secrets of their own, and Alice’s flailing attempts to be clued in are clueless. She’s adrift, and her misdirected energy sets the tone for the film. 

In the southeastern port city of Sète, a dewy young woman named Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) picks up an older woman in the restaurant where she works. The sophisticated and enigmatic Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) enjoys sex with Marion, but declines to partake of Marion’s borderline-obsessive and impetuously offered love. As Marion chases Evelyne, a faraway catfishing scheme and a cringeworthy case of mistaken identity will draw Michel into the women’s fevered entanglement. Like Marion, the stolid Michel has a hard time taking no for an answer, and that blind spot leads him into disaster for himself and others.

It is hard to discuss Only the Animals at any length without revealing too much of the twisty plot or the various degrees of uneasy separation of its characters. Moll handles shifts in point of view and the order of events masterfully. The Ivory Coast subplot featuring a desperate young con artist, Armand (Guy Roger “Bibesse” N’drin), is played as with as much confidence as the French scenes. Atmospheric locations from a frigid barn to teeming Abidjan mirror the protagonists’ agitated states, and the strong acting throws the viewer into the emotional impasses when the characters face off but fail to understand each other.

Intricate and masterful, strange and heartbreaking, Only the Animals is a great new entry into the multilinear narrative canon.