When they turn up drunk to meet Laura’s sister’s new baby, she tells them that “Sooner or later the party has to end.” A card on her mantlepiece reads ‘Welcome to the club’. “You won’t get away with it much longer,” Laura’s brother-in-law warns Tyler about her smoking after she mentions her upcoming thirtieth birthday. Rather, the scrutiny of Laura and Tyler’s intemperance by others functions as a commentary on the ways in which female excess and impropriety are judged through an explicitly gendered lens. In doing so, it refuses to cast their relationship as a fun if misguided ‘phase’ which must be relinquished in order to achieve happiness through marriage, babies and the rest. and the sense that Laura is drifting away from her.Īnimals neither condemns nor valorises Laura and Tyler’s intense but messy friendship.

Tyler, meanwhile, clings to the idea of an endless hedonism to distract herself from the sadness of her complicated homelife back in the U.S. The frustration she feels at her lack of progress is growing but she doesn’t know how to push ahead. Laura has been trying to write a novel for the last decade. They both work as baristas and have been going to the same dingy pub for years. Laura and Tyler share an apartment in a creaky Georgian house in Dublin, a city we see primarily through the fuggy half-light of streetlamps at dusk and an omnipresent sheen of rain. Animals may sample tropes from this genre – the arrival of an attractive male saviour type, obligatory wedding dress shopping, ribald female behaviour giving way to something like maturity – but it does so only in order to ask “Why this, still? Why not something else?” “The fairy tale is the failure,” Tyler tells Laura after a pregnancy announcement from Laura’s sister over a family dinner – an announcement to which Laura initially responds, “Oh, shit.” Tyler’s statement reflects the film’s interrogation of the choices women are expected to make as part of the narrative of ‘growing-up’, the kind that are typically – and often unproblematically – celebrated by the rom-com.

Andrea Dworkin calls fairy tales, “the first scenarios of women and men which mold our psyches”, teaching fundamental cultural lessons about gender and relationships.¹ “We have taken the fairy tales of childhood with us into maturity,” she writes, “chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.” In Animals (2019), the latest feature from Australian director Sophie Hyde, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emma Jane Unsworth, hard-partying best friends Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) are finding the transition into their thirties increasingly difficult.

Woman hating by andrea dworkin