Ok, this movie is actually based on true event that happened in Belgium more than decade ago, when a gang of homophobic guys doing violence towards islamic gay guy. They beat him up and left him died lies on the ground during possibly cold season.

This reminds me to Amphetamine (I'm not sure whether it's taiwan or hongkong movie), same brutal, same disturbing, except in amohetamine, the victim is survived, and in Animals there's no ra*pe scene thing. But the reason why this violence's happened because both of them want to help a girl avoid the gang.

Overall this movie 7/10 from me, but again, the graphic is kinda disturbing, and I skipped some of "that part" because it's too painful to watch.

«Animals» is the kind of film that, when it ended, I thought, "I would have wanted to make a movie like this." And it has nothing to do with its subject or its technical values, but with its dramaturgical proposal and its audiovisual conception. Nabil Ben Yadir appears for the first time in my panorama of contemporary world cinema. And maybe, in a few years, he will abandon this way of telling us a story and become more "mainstream". Or maybe not.

The fact is that Yadir uses a structural and narrative strategy that, because it is rare in ordinary cinema, makes more convincing its account of the crime of the 32-year-old Belgian citizen Ihsane Jarfi, which occurred in the city of Liège in 2012, at the hands of four men who inhumanly humiliated him, tortured him, robbed him and abandoned him naked on the outskirts of the city, where he died a few hours later.

The first part of the film takes place during his mother's birthday, in which Ihsane's older brother (in the film, Brahim) causes tragedy by preventing Brahim's five-year-old partner from reaching the celebration. He assaults and expels him without Brahim knowing: similarly, the director spares us the scene and concentrates on the homophobia of the brother, who corners Brahim and wields the old claim of "respect" for the (Muslim) family. The rhythm of this block of scenes, encounters (including a beautiful one, between Brahim and his father) and disagreements, is agile, dynamic, with hand-held camera, establishing a happy contrast between the party, Brahim's wait for his lover and the harassment of his brother and his wife. Brahim leaves the party.

The next block is the most tense and impressive, an orgy of violence and death that mixes shots of traditional composition and format with long fixed shots of the camera observing (Brahim naked in the trunk, for example) and other moving shots shot using the format of mobiles. After having several drinks in a gay nightclub that he often visits, Brahim helps a prostitute on the street being harassed by four drugged and drunk men who are celebrating the birthday of the vilest of all. Brahim proposes to take them to a women's bar, unaware that he has proposed his own death. This time the director does not spare us details and it is worth warning susceptible people that this section could affect them.

The final third of the film is dramaturgically brilliant, introducing us to the home of Loïc, the youngest of the four murderers, when his cronies drop him off at his door. A few minutes are enough to deduce the violence generated by his family picture. However, Yadir's script reserves more surprises for us when Loïc, barely out of adolescence, attends his biological father's wedding, where, in addition to seeing the boy suffer a crisis of pain in the hands with which he contributed to the death of Brahim, the 360-degree circular final shot reveals a detail of his father that obliquely but unmistakably establishes a connection to the crime.

«Animals» is a recommendable film about the global reality of homophobia in social strata that we rarely think of looking at, in these days when everyone celebrates the tricks of gender and the trans world. It is interesting that the film resists the fashionable formats (wide screen) and uses the old aspect ratio of 4:3, as in the origins of cinema in which films were squares of light.

This is a very difficult movie to watch. It's based on true events: the atrocious assault, torture and murder of a gay young man with an Islamic background by a group of drunken homophobic sadists in 2012. Filmmaker Nabil Ben Nadir doesn't spare the viewers, we get to see the whole ordeal in all its gruesome details. At first I was skeptical about this: is such an apalling display of violence really necessary to make the point? But gradually I changed my mind: yes, by showing it thus harsh and unpolished, it's the only way to convince viewers of the lengths of brutality to which homophobia up to this very day can go, and to let us almost personally feel the reality of it.

Cinematographically the director has used an interesting approach, dividing the story in three different parts. At first we see secretly gay Brahim in the midst of a festive birthday-celebration with his large Islamic family, nervously awaiting his boyfriends arrival, when he is suddenly confronted by a angry family member about his being gay. The gap between the warmth of the family and this ostracism couldn't be bigger. In part two Brahim unsuspectingly takes a lift in a car filled with drunken thugs, which leads to the fatal abuse and murder. And then there is a surprising third part, where we follow one of these guys in his own everyday life, to illustrate (as I saw it) that danger can smoulder in the most inconspicuous and seemingly well behaving people. All the time the hand-held camera follows the characters extremely close, in long nervous shots, making you as a viewer almost part of the action.

Brahim is played by Soufiane Chilah, he is already excellent in part one, but especially in part two one can only admire his readiness to go all the way, to comply with the director's need for extreme realism; the shooting of these difficult scenes must have been an actual ordeal for him, as well as for the whole crew.