Ben Affleck and Kerry Washington’s political thriller invites viewers to hunt for a conspiracy. Its more disturbing revelation is how easily a crisis becomes an opportunity.
Spoilers ahead: This review discusses the kidnapping twist, the affair and the ending.
Was the kidnapping staged to help Mark Kimball win an election? Who were the abductors? Why does Abigail’s affair matter so much—and why does the man she is sleeping with disappear from the story?
Those are among the questions raised in a Threads discussion that took over our weekend entertainment. Some viewers praise Animals for letting its characters’ contradictions speak for themselves. Others find the villains underdeveloped, the ending unconvincing or the story too compressed for a feature film. Those reactions point to the central tension in Ben Affleck’s Netflix thriller: It sets up a kidnapping mystery, then shifts its attention toward the moral compromises inside a marriage and a political campaign.
The most important answer is this: Animals does not establish that the kidnapping was engineered to elect Mark. Instead, it shows him turning a real kidnapping—and someone else’s heroism—into a political victory. That distinction makes the ending less a conspiracy reveal than a portrait of opportunism.
What is ‘Animals’ actually about?
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a wealthy lawyer whose independent campaign for mayor of Los Angeles is consuming his family’s finances. His wife, Abigail, played by Kerry Washington, does not know how much he has spent. Mark, in turn, does not know she is having an affair. Their public image depends on keeping both secrets hidden.
Then someone calls demanding $7 million for the return of their son, Denny. With their money tied up in the campaign, Mark and Abigail turn to Dayle Burton, a fixer played by Gillian Anderson, who can produce the cash—but at a punishing price.
The premise initially asks how far two parents will go to save their child. The twist asks a harder question: How much of that willingness survives when the endangered child belongs to someone else?
Whose son was kidnapped—and how did the mistake happen?
The abductors take Hector, not Denny. Hector is the son of Ramon, an undocumented worker who is in a relationship with the Kimballs’ housekeeper, Cecilia. The boys go trick-or-treating in matching costumes, creating the opportunity for the mistaken identity. Denny eventually returns home safely; Hector remains captive.
That revelation changes the film’s moral stakes.
Mark and Abigail no longer face the loss of their own son. They must decide whether to assume enormous financial risk for Ramon’s child. Meanwhile, campaign manager Sam recognizes the political danger of paying to save Denny but declining to do the same for Hector—particularly when Mark needs Latino support.
The uncomfortable question is not simply whether Mark will help. It is whether compassion and calculation have become impossible to separate.
Was the whole thing planned to win the election?
No coordinated campaign scheme is revealed. The abduction is presented as genuine, the wrong child is taken, and the eventual rescue nearly kills Mark.
The suspicion is understandable, though. One viewer in the Threads discussion stated whether the crisis was designed to secure an electoral victory and recover the campaign money. Another questions whether so many deaths make that interpretation plausible.
What the ending establishes is exploitation after the fact, not orchestration beforehand.
Ramon saves Mark and Hector by shooting the last surviving kidnapper. Mark subsequently takes public credit for that act. The resulting story transforms him into a champion of an immigrant family, helps him win the mayoral election and opens the possibility of a presidential campaign.
He does not need to have created the emergency to benefit from it.
Who were the kidnappers? Was Sam involved?
This is the film’s least cleanly resolved question.
Netflix’s official explanation says viewers do not learn the kidnappers’ identities or their full story. Washington describes that withholding as intentional: The film’s concern is less the external enemy than the capacity for wrongdoing within its central characters.
Decider offers a more specific interpretation, connecting an unmasked abductor to James Bureaux, a man shown researching Mark early in the film. Its explanation suggests a grievance related to Mark’s litigation against companies that polluted drinking water, but presents that connection with qualifying language rather than as an unequivocal revelation.
The careful conclusion is that the film supplies clues to a personal grievance without developing a fully explicit account of the kidnapping operation. It does not reveal Sam as the mastermind.
That is also a legitimate weakness to identify in a review. Withholding the villains’ backstory can keep the focus on Mark’s choices, but it can leave viewers feeling that a mystery the film encouraged them to solve has been inadequately answered.
Why does Dayle die—and what happens to the money?
Dayle offers a way to rescue Hector without surrendering the ransom permanently: Her gunman can kill the kidnappers, allowing her to recover the cash. Mark ultimately agrees to the lethal plan.
The operation fails because Dayle misjudges the opposition. Her gunman kills two abductors, but a third shoots both him and Dayle. Ramon kills that final attacker, saving Mark and Hector. Anderson describes Dayle’s fatal mistake as hubris: She trusts her assessment that there are only two kidnappers. Mark then takes Dayle’s phone, which contains incriminating recordings, and participates in concealing the bodies. Ramon leaves for Mexico with Cecilia, Hector and the cash; Decider’s account describes him using the money to establish a ranch.
The outcome is therefore not a simple restoration of the Kimballs’ finances. Ramon gains material security, while Mark gains something politically more valuable: control over the public version of events.
Why is Abigail’s affair so important?
The affair is not presented as the cause of the kidnapping. Its function is to expose the bargain underlying the Kimballs’ marriage. Mark has secretly gambled their financial stability on his ambition. Abigail has sought intimacy elsewhere. Each has preserved the appearance of a partnership while withholding a fundamental truth from the other.
Her lover, UCLA professor Ron Sperling, played by Ray Fisher, matters primarily because his existence forces that confrontation. The film’s resolution stays with Abigail’s decision about Mark rather than developing Ron’s future.
One viewer on threads discussion wanted more background to the affair and more explanation of Ron’s disappearance. That criticism is understandable: A relationship consequential enough to destabilize the marriage can feel thin when the other participant exists largely as a catalyst.
But the film’s sharper idea is that confession does not necessarily make people better. Mark and Abigail become more honest with each other while preparing to become less honest with everyone else.
Do Mark and Abigail genuinely reconcile?
They recommit to the marriage, but the ending does not present that commitment as moral redemption.
Washington describes their final understanding as a decision to remain a couple, protect their family and win together. Affleck similarly frames the marriage as a relationship whose participants finally see each other more clearly and decide whether to stay.
Abigail then stands beside Mark as he delivers the false public account of the rescue. Their unity rests on shared knowledge—and shared concealment.
That is the unsettling relationship payoff: Their marriage becomes stronger as their public deception becomes more complete.
Why is the movie called ‘Animals’?
The title concerns the instincts beneath respectable identities: fear, desire, ambition, self-preservation and the stories people construct to justify them.
Affleck describes the film’s central question as whether people possess a genuine moral compass or act in their own interests and build an explanation afterward.
Ramon complicates that cynical framework. He acts to save his child and also saves Mark. Yet Mark receives the public recognition, while Ramon leaves the country. The contrast exposes how citizenship, wealth and access to publicity shape whose actions count as heroism.
The verdict: A stronger moral provocation than a tidy mystery
The strongest reading of Animals is not that every unanswered question conceals another twist. It is that the kidnapping reveals people who can convert almost anything—even honesty, sacrifice and family loyalty—into an instrument of self-interest.
Its limitations remain worth naming. The abductors’ thin characterization can frustrate the mystery. The affair’s compressed treatment can make the marital conflict feel underexplored. The ending asks viewers to accept a sweeping political transformation built on a carefully managed lie. Those are not automatically resolved by saying the ambiguity is intentional.
But the final irony is clear. Ramon performs the decisive rescue. Mark turns it into a campaign narrative. Abigail helps preserve that narrative. The election rewards the story the public hears, not the events that actually occurred.
Animals is most provocative when it stops asking who committed the kidnapping and starts asking who gets to own the truth afterward.
