“You know, when I was a kid, I used to wanna rip that moon right out of the sky. But life doesn’t work that way. Does it?” 

Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), an outcast teenage goalie, longs to play on the hockey team of her small northern town. She meets and falls in love with newcomer Jonny (Amandla Stenberg), an alluring but tormented figure skater. The girls’ relationship blossoms despite Heather’s struggles with her alcoholic mother, her hidden sexual orientation, and a familial curse that transforms her into a feral wolf under the full moon. Heather and Jonny’s secret tryst soon clashes against the conformity of their small community, exposing dangerous truths and igniting a passionate, violent night of personal transformation.

With My Animal, Jacqueline Castel blends science fiction, horror and drama to create a fable about self-acceptance and coming of age.

Accepting who you are and where you come from

My Animal is a story about heritage: about what is passed down through our lineage and how it defines us as individuals. Here, the director uses the werewolf myth to get her message across. It’s really effective. It’s a way of more subtly bringing in the other, more realistic facts that the character has to come to terms with. Realities that many humans experience. For example, her mother’s alcoholism, her homosexuality or the fact that she doesn’t really have any friends. 

It’s also a story about first love and how it can serve as a catalyst for radical change, revealing what we most need and what most needs to be healed within us.

Adolescence and early adulthood is a profound struggle that everyone has to go through, no matter what personal issues and challenges we face. That’s the point of a film like My Animal, which uses Heather’s character to show that we must, in the end, find the courage to accept and express ourselves.

When horror and drama meet

Through the struggles of these characters, we encounter what works and what doesn’t in the quest for identity, authenticity and self-realization, and the courage we must muster in the face of personal crisis and discrimination.

I know, I know. Who would have expected so much depth in a werewolf movie. Here, then, is a fine example of how not to be fooled by appearances, and that behind genre cinema, we can hide an analysis of society and the challenges of adolescence.

Who, like Heather, doesn’t understand what quiet desperation is.  Of course, the isolation of being an outsider in a small town, and rebelling against it in your youth, doesn’t represent everyone’s reality. But who hasn’t felt like an outsider in their own family, or felt like they don’t recognize themselves in it, only to discover that the most valuable and distinctive aspects of their individuality derive from the very things they’ve tried to reject? 

Yes, My Animal is a horror film. But it’s also an introspective, slow-moving film that’s likely to unsettle you. The stakes for the characters are dramatic and heavy. The film does deal with domestic violence, alcoholism and sexual discrimination. But when we see all the violence and intolerance that has resurfaced in Canada and Quebec in recent months, we can only, unfortunately, find this feature film highly relevant.

A little more…

If there’s one message that should stand out from My Animal, it’s that what makes us different and is often hard to accept in adolescence is also, in the end, what defines us and transforms us into the adults we need to be. 

Maybe the transformation isn’t the one that turns us into wolves (at least, I hope not), but the changes we go through can sometimes be just as important and brutal. 

My animal is presented at the VIFF, on September 30 and October 2, 2023.

Trailer