Ben Affleck is back behind and in front of the camera with Animals, an entertaining new thriller that spices up the kidnap movie formula with a neat twist that asks big moral questions of its protagonists and viewers.

Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a tycoon running as an independent candidate to become the next mayor of Los Angeles. (It should be noted that LA is currently in a heated mayoral campaign, so kudos, Netflix, on the timing of your film’s release.) Mark is a middle-aged white male Army veteran with progressive views and a Black wife and mixed-race son, who takes no outside funding and speaks fluent Spanish. It’s a cynical political strategist’s dream candidate come true, something the film acknowledges.

It’s Halloween and LA is just days away from electing its next mayor. Mark has run a vigorous, self-funded campaign, and yet he’s behind enough that he could lose the election and with it, all the fortune he’s poured into it. His therapist wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) doesn’t know the extent to which he’s spent their savings on his campaign. And what Mark doesn’t know about – but which was revealed in the trailer – is that Abigail is having an affair (the other man is played by Affleck’s Justice League co-star Ray Fisher).

Mark and Abigail get a call from an unknown man who reveals that he’s kidnapped their son Denny (Christopher Woodley) and demands a $7 million ransom, money they don’t have on hand because it’s all tied up in Mark’s self-funded campaign.

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