American Animal

2011 Comedy

Critically ill, eccentric Jimmy (Matt D'Elia) makes a complete break from reality upon learning that his roommate James (Brendan Fletcher) is about to start a new job. Jimmy and James are not just roommates, but best friends as well. They share a trendy loft in downtown Los Angeles, and frivolously pass the days away drinking, doing drugs, having one-night stands, and playing board games. For Jimmy, it's the perfect way of life. But James craves structure, and in the morning he will start a new job. To Jimmy, it's the ultimate betrayal. Now, as the two close-knit roommates enter into a hysterical battle of wills while sharing their last day of freedom in the company of two beautiful women (Mircea Monroe and Angela Sarafyan), Jimmy becomes swept up in a complex vortex of emotions that push him ever closer to the brink of total insanity.

Director: Matt D'Elia

Starring: Matt D'Elia, Brendan Fletcher, Mircea Monroe, Angela Sarafyan, Billie

Reviews

  • American Animal is a wildly experimental debut for D'Elia, who uses hand-held digital cameras and lots of jump cuts. It is well-acted and features witty repartee.

    V.A. Musetto - New York Post

    29 November 2012

  • Bizarre, off-putting, and finally demanding of rubberneck respect, this fish-tank indie never leaves a rather lovely duplex apartment, occupied by an unemployed Everyman (Brendan Fletcher) and his roommate, Jimmy (director Matt D'Elia).

    Michael Atkinson - Village Voice

    29 November 2012

  • While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins.

    David Fear - Time Out New York

    29 November 2012

  • At first American Animal has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure's emptiness. But when James admits he's taken a job - upending the roomies' slacker utopia - American Animal becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution).

    Robert Abele - Los Angeles Times

    29 November 2012

  • Seen as some kind of absurdist, meta-textual horror story, American Animal almost works. In every other way? It's fuckin' poopy-loopy.

    Noel Murray - The A.V. Club

    29 November 2012

Awards

No awards