Arriving amid a consequential midterm season, Ben Affleck’s Netflix thriller finds its sharpest subject in Latino electoral power, the vulnerability of undocumented workers and the political appropriation of their suffering.
Spoilers: This review discusses the kidnapping reveal and ending.
An undocumented father needs his child rescued. A mayoral candidate needs Latino votes. In Animals, these two emergencies converge—and only one becomes a winning campaign story.
Arriving as immigration enforcement and shifting Latino allegiances help shape the midterm election debate, Ben Affleck’s political thriller offers an uncomfortable study of the distance between courting a community and protecting its members. Its most revealing question is not whether a politician will help an immigrant family. It is what he expects to receive in return.
That distinction has particular resonance this election season. An NBC News/Telemundo poll finds Latino voters moving away from Republicans, with two-thirds saying the administration’s deportation policies have gone too far. The survey also finds that 27 percent know someone detained or deported by ICE in the past two years. Economic concerns remain central, but immigration enforcement is not an abstract policy dispute for many respondents. It reaches into their families and daily lives.
Animals gives that proximity a brutal dramatic form: What happens when a parent’s fear of immigration enforcement stands between him and help for his kidnapped child?
Affleck directs and stars as Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose political ambitions have quietly endangered his family’s financial security. His wife, Abigail, played by Kerry Washington, is having an affair. Their marriage is already sustained by concealment when a caller demands $7 million for the return of their son. Netflix’s account of the story lays out the financial and marital secrets beneath the emergency.
The premise initially appears to be a familiar exercise in wealthy-parent desperation. Then the movie changes the identity of the endangered child and, with it, the meaning of nearly everything that follows.
The kidnappers have taken Hector, the son of Ramon, an undocumented immigrant played by Luis Gerardo Méndez, rather than the Kimballs’ son, Denny. The boys went trick-or-treating in matching costumes. Denny returns home safely. Hector remains captive—a mistaken-identity twist detailed in Decider’s ending explanation.
For the Kimballs, the danger has become optional. For Ramon, it has not.
That imbalance is the film’s real subject.
Ramon lacks the money, influence and security available to Mark. His immigration status also makes seeking police assistance frightening rather than straightforward. In an account of Méndez’s comments about the character, the actor describes Ramon as unable to turn to the police because of his status. The movie places him in a devastating bind: Asking the authorities to protect his family carries its own perceived threat to that family.
The point is not that every undocumented crime victim necessarily faces detention after contacting police. It is that fear can make protection feel inaccessible precisely when it is most urgently needed.
The film establishes Mark’s selective solidarity before the kidnapping. He runs on a pro-immigrant platform but declines to employ Ramon because hiring an undocumented worker could damage his campaign. As Boston.com’s review notes, his public position does not translate into a willingness to accept that private political risk. The immigrant is acceptable as a constituency to court, less acceptable as a worker whose presence might require defending.
It is a small decision with a large explanatory value. Mark’s sympathy has conditions. His campaign is one of them.
Latino support, meanwhile, is essential to his electoral calculations. His adviser, Sam, played by Steven Yeun, recognizes the opportunity in the kidnapping: Helping Hector can be presented as proof that Mark is devoted to the community whose votes he needs. As IndieWire’s review observes, the child’s rescue becomes an occasion for electoral manipulation.
The film’s political transaction depends on the separation between those being courted and those being used to make the appeal. Ramon’s vulnerability supplies a story that Mark can sell to voters. The person at the center of the crisis has the least control over its public meaning.
The connection to the midterms is therefore more precise than a general observation that politicians exploit tragedy. Latino voters are a diverse and shifting electorate, not a single bloc motivated only by immigration. NBC’s analysis of its polling identifies the cost of living as the leading concern even as enforcement policies provoke substantial opposition. Animals captures a campaign’s temptation to compress that complexity into a reassuring image: a candidate who supposedly understands, cares and acts.
Whether he actually does those things becomes secondary to whether the image works.
The ending makes that substitution explicit. Ramon performs the decisive rescue, saving both Hector and Mark. Mark then takes public credit. The story of a politician risking his life for an immigrant family becomes an electoral asset, helping him win the mayoralty. Abigail stands beside him as he delivers the false account.
As Netflix’s explanation of the finale recounts, the man with the least institutional power supplies the courage, while the man seeking more power receives the recognition. Ramon leaves for Mexico with his family and the money. Mark remains to turn their ordeal into his future.
The film does not reveal that the kidnapping was staged to secure an election victory. Its accusation is more ordinary, and more unsettling. A politician does not have to create a crisis to exploit it. He needs access to its survivors, control over its presentation and an audience willing to accept the polished version.
Even the kidnapper’s lightly sketched identity belongs to this larger argument about power.
Early inserts point toward James Bureaux, a man whose business collapsed in connection with an environmental initiative associated with Mark. In an interview explaining the antagonist, Affleck described him as an unintended casualty who lost his shop and family and came to blame the candidate. Mark does not know who he is. The name is inferred from the opening clues rather than explicitly confirmed in that interview.
The politician remembers a public achievement. Someone else remembers a private disaster.
Affleck explained in the same interview that he did not want an exhaustive account of the villain’s motives to make the threat feel comfortably containable. But the choice creates a genuine dramatic weakness: The connection is so briefly presented that the mystery can feel neglected rather than deliberately withheld.
Other strands are similarly compressed. Abigail’s affair exposes the distance between the Kimballs’ public marriage and private conduct, but her lover receives little development beyond his role in forcing a confrontation. Gillian Anderson’s Dayle Burton supplies the ransom money and a lethal plan for recovering it, introducing a world of influence and violence the film largely uses rather than explores. These relationships and decisions are outlined in Netflix’s ending breakdown, but their narrative functions are clearer than their emotional depth.
Those limitations matter. A powerful political reading does not automatically make every relationship convincing or every loose thread satisfying.
Still, the marriage’s resolution reinforces the movie’s central concern. Mark and Abigail become more honest with each other without becoming more honest with the public. Their renewed partnership rests partly on their willingness to preserve the same advantageous lie.
In that sense, Animals is less about the discovery of corruption than the negotiation of complicity.
Its strongest insight for this election season is that the language of solidarity can conceal a profoundly unequal exchange. An immigrant family experiences catastrophe. A campaign extracts evidence of compassion. The family’s fear, risk and sacrifice become material for someone else’s ascent.
Mark wants Latino voters to see him as their protector. The movie asks you to notice whose protection was uncertain, whose courage was indispensable and whose name ends up on the campaign story. Ben Afleck’s character speaking Spanish in most of the movie also shows how politicians use language to get close to their constituents they are trying to engage.
Ramon saves the child. Mark gets elected. The distance between those two outcomes is where Animals finds its bite.
