Animal: Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s craft is just as infantile as his politics; what does he want us to talk about next?

Animal: Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s craft is just as infantile as his politics; what does he want us to talk about next?

Post Credits Scene: Intellectually bankrupt, morally reprehensible and stylistically inept, Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Animal is about as irredeemable as they come.

An hour into the intolerably long Animal, Ranbir Kapoor’s protagonist — a man named Ranvijay — marches into his father’s steel factory, where he is quite literally put on a pedestal. There, framed perfectly against a swastika in the background

the company is called Swastik Steel — he proceeds to deliver an impassioned speech about honour and loyalty. Ranvijay’s seething; his father has just survived a brutal attack. In the middle of his monologue, he raises his right arm and pressures his subjects to swear an oath. And within minutes, director Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s homage to — of all things — Adolf Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies is complete. Slightly shocked, you can’t help but wonder, “Has a child made this movie?”

Unlike Vanga’s previous film, the effortlessly infuriating Kabir Singh, Animal feels like it was engineered to offend. But as with most things, insincerity can spotted from a mile away. Kabir Singh’s misogyny riled people up mostly because it felt like the movie was bent on giving its troubled protagonist a free pass. In Animal — a

far more stylised film, and therefore more difficult to take seriously — the most provocative moments are inserted into the plot, as opposed to the plot itself being provocative. Ranvijay commands his lover to lick his shoe, he marches into a classroom with a loaded assault rifle, and he lectures a woman about periods… Faux edginess like this is how you end up with a movie in which a phallic machine gun has a better character arc than the primary villain.