My Animal Makes for a Captivating Debut

My eyes were first captivated by the seductive cinematography of My Animal in the opening scene of Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) sitting alone on her floor watching the 1984 “Beauty and the Beast” episode of Faerie Tale Theatre as the moon rises. Covered completely in by darkness, only two changes signal her transformation into a Lycan: the sexually suggestive way she crawls on all fours toward the camera and her piercing red eyes, like those of a pale rabbit in a dark room. As frightening as the image might be, the film never again approaches the visual tropes of the horror genre with such a transparent hand: do not expect werewolf carnage from Jacqueline Castel’s feature film debut My Animal.

The sexually suggestive imagery of the opening proves more representative than the horror. Somewhere in Canada, hockey goaltender Heather crushes on the rink’s new figure skater, Jonny (Amandla Stenberg, most famous for her child acting role as Rue in The Hunger Games). There is no more stereotypical ice-rink romance than hockey player woes figure skater, and, speaking from personal experience, the figure skater is always the more interesting personality in the potential relationship. The only thing “atypical” about this courtship is its queerness…and its multispecies-ness.

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