Animal: Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s craft is just as infantile as his politics; what does he want us to talk about next?

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It’s a movie that reflects its director’s inherent neediness, a neediness that is represented in Ranvijay’s lifelong quest for his absent father’s affection. Vanga’s main complaint in the days that followed Animal’s release — this was the time when he was elevated to superstar status, mind you — was that critics didn’t appreciate his movie. While the rest of his collaborators were defending the film’s irresponsible politics by producing its box office receipts — as if that matters — Vanga never mentioned the hundreds of crores that Animal had earned by then. His eye was on his Moby-Dick, the critical appreciation that he seemed to realise in real-time will likely elude him forever.

Ranbir Kapoor in a still from Animal.

And having barely come to terms with this highly probable reality, Vanga continued to throw a tantrum, insisting that Animal should be appreciated for its ‘craft’ — as if a film’s craft is in some way divorced from its themes. But for argument’s sake, let us consider the filmmaking for a moment. While Vanga has denied ripping off Oldboy in Animal’s pre-interval action block, anybody who has seen Park Chan-wook’s seminal film — a contemporary tragedy about the emptiness of revenge — would recognise what Vanga is going for. What made Oldboy’s signature hallway fight scene so special — besides, of course, the sight of Choi Min-sik axing his way through a horde of enemies — was that it was filmed in an elaborately choreographed single shot.

Fight sequences set in hallways have become increasingly common since then, with some of the most impressive approximations being found in Gareth Evans’ The Raid and the Marvel series Daredevil. Both these projects appeared to understand that what made Oldboy’s centrepiece fight sequence so thrilling wasn’t the venue, but the staging. Vanga, on the other hand, chooses to retain the cramped location (and the axe) but robs the scene of the very thing that made it so memorable in the first place. The action is edited to bits, with cuts so frequent that they would make a butcher blush.

At one point in this scene, which, by the way, owes just as big a debt to Scarface as it does to Oldboy — at least geography-wise — Vanga uses a robotic arm to film Ranvijay in a graceful circular motion. But even though he presumably had a splendid uncut shot of the raw action, he chose to splice it to pieces with unprompted and frankly uncouth cuts. It’s a completely confounding decision, but one that’s in line with the filmmaker’s staggeringly underconfident sensibilities. This is, after all, the same film in which Bobby Deol’s villain is introduced in a transition right out of Windows Movie Maker circa 2002.

Vanga has little sense of momentum, frequently sucking the air out of the narrative by cutting to flashbacks or to random scenes that should’ve been deleted altogether. But nothing is more baffling than his decision to cut to an odd conversation about itchy underwear immediately after Ranvijay uncovers the identity of the man who attempted to murder his dad. As if the movie weren’t long enough already, the underwear scene also has a payoff, whether you were looking for one or not.

Ranbir Kapoor in a still from Animal.

The filmmaker’s tendency to stir the hornet’s nest is abundantly clear from the first frame to the last — Animal is bookended by glimpses of a geriatric Ranvijay, clearly not having evolved even a tiny bit after ruining the lives of virtually everybody around him. And for all his overcorrections — Vanga appears to be directly addressing the controversies that followed Kabir Singh’s release by giving Rashmika Mandanna’s character more agency here — the filmmaker once again can’t help but view his problematic protagonist as the hero. It’s obvious that he didn’t quite understand the real issue that rational audiences had with his last film, because his adolescent response to it is to have Mandanna’s character — Geetanjali — slap Ranvijay repeatedly here.

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The problem with Kabir Singh wasn’t who was being slapped and who wasn’t; the problem was that the movie appeared to endorse the idea of violence in relationships. Contrary to what the filmmaker might believe, Animal is hardly as offensive as he thinks it is, and nor is he the maverick that many have labelled him as. If anything, the fact that Vanga covered his bases so carefully here is a sign of how insecure he was of being criticised again.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.