My Animal really wants to be Ginger Snaps by way of A24: aching queer romance, icy mood, neon-soaked loneliness, plus a dash of lycanthropy as metaphor for desire, shame, and the horror of being different. What it mostly ends up being is a 90-minute perfume commercial about feelings, occasionally interrupted by the reminder that, technically, this is supposed to be a werewolf movie.
We open strong: a young Heather transforms under the full moon and claws her own mom’s chest open like she’s trying to speedrun puberty. It’s sharp, brutal, and suggests we’re in for a nervy, dangerous exploration of monstrous girlhood. Unfortunately, that’s basically the last time the movie feels dangerous. The rest of the film behaves like it’s worried someone will slip a content note under the door.
Adult Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) is a hockey-playing outsider dealing with alcoholic mom, taciturn werewolf dad, and a secret family curse they treat like a really intense gluten allergy. Enter Jonny (Amandla Stenberg), a figure skater gliding into town with big hair, bigger eyeliner, and a terrible taste in boyfriends. Sparks fly. Emotions swell. Wolves… mostly wait patiently in the corner for permission to exist.
To be fair, Menuez and Stenberg do their best with what they’re given. Their chemistry is there, but the script keeps treating it like a fragile antique that might break if anyone actually says or does anything decisive. We get long, lingering scenes of staring across rooms, slow-motion skating, and quiet yearning. It’s not that this can’t work—it absolutely can—but when your movie is literally about a lesbian werewolf, there should be at least one moment where the audience feels something other than, “Wow, that’s a lot of fog.”
The central problem is that My Animal is all metaphor, no muscle. Lycanthropy is a stand-in for queerness, anger, inherited trauma, mental illness, and probably the housing crisis if you squint hard enough. But the movie refuses to commit to any sharp edges. The transformations are more implied than experienced. The werewolf attacks are shot like music videos: pretty, abstract, and suspiciously devoid of sleeves being shredded or jaws doing anything memorable. Imagine An American Werewolf in London if the transformation scene were described to you by someone who didn’t want to upset anyone.
The family dynamic should be a meaty anchor: Patti, the bitter alcoholic mother (Heidi von Palleske), and Henry, the grizzled werewolf dad (Stephen McHattie), both trying and failing to handle their daughter’s curse. Instead we get a lot of “stern look, half-finished sentence, cut to another neon light.” McHattie in particular feels criminally underused; he’s a guy whose face looks like it could tell three horror stories without moving, and the movie mostly has him hover in the background like a sad taxidermy exhibit.
The film’s idea of tension is to watch Heather walk home alone. A lot. Snow. Streetlights. Her boots crunch. The score hums. We get it: she’s isolated. We don’t need ten establishing shots of “Canada is cold and straight people are mean” to understand she’s not thriving.
And then there’s the queerness. The movie clearly wants to be a painful, tender portrayal of a closeted girl in a hostile town, and that’s a rich vein. But every time it edges toward something raw—Jonny’s crappy boyfriend, Heather’s shame, her brothers seeing her with another girl—it backs off. Conflicts flare and then deflate like a sad balloon at 2 a.m. The film seems terrified of making anyone too complicated. Jonny goes from alluring to avoidant so fast it feels like someone skipped a chapter; Heather’s subsequent spiral is more montage than character arc.
Where My Animal could lean into the messy, specific horrors of small-town queer life—with a literal monster in the mix—it instead hides behind dreamy aesthetics. There are flashes of something sharper, like the boys’ bar fight or Heather’s final confrontation with Rick, but by then it’s too little, too late. When the long-promised werewolf violence finally arrives, it feels less like payoff and more like the movie remembered it has “horror” on the label and slapped some blood on the third act.
The pacing is another casualty of vibes-over-story. The middle stretch sags under repetitive beats: Heather and Jonny skate, flirt, drift apart, reconnect, repeat. Heather’s family reminds her to be careful. Heather ignores everyone. Moon happens. Nothing much changes. There’s a difference between slow-burn and slow-leak; this is the latter, and by the time the climax lumbers in, the emotional tires are mostly flat.
Which is a pity, because buried somewhere under the soft-focus melancholy is a genuinely compelling idea: what if the monster metaphor wasn’t about becoming a horror to your community, but about the cost of constantly trying not to? Heather is forever being told to hide, behave, fit in, stay small. The one moment she fully embraces what she is—mauled, furious, cornered—she ends up tearing Rick apart and fleeing into the woods. It’s the closest the movie comes to catharsis, and it lasts about twelve seconds before we’re back to lyrical suffering.
By the time we reach the ending—Heather blood-soaked, Patti gently bathing her, then urging her to leave town—you realize the movie’s moral is less “embrace your true self” and more “maybe just move away quietly before the cops get involved.” The post-credits line, “You can’t mess with animals, man,” is meant to be ominous; it mostly plays like the movie trying to talk itself up.
On the technical side, everything is perfectly fine. The cinematography is moody and often beautiful, the score is appropriately broody, and the production design nails that nowhere-town stuck between decades. But “fine” is a problem when your themes are screaming for something feral. The whole thing feels like it’s been heavily sedated. Even the full moons seem a bit tired.
Look, it’s not that My Animal is unwatchable. It’s just frustrating. You can see the outlines of a much better, nastier film. One where queerness and monstrosity intertwine in ways that are actually dangerous, where transformations hurt, where love is both salvation and risk, and where the wolf is allowed to be something more than a shy metaphor wrapped in flannel. Instead we get a movie that flirts with boldness and then slinks back to its safe corner like a dog that’s been yelled at too many times.
In the end, My Animal is less a howl and more a whine through a soundproof door: you know there’s something alive in there, and it probably has teeth, but the film is so determined not to scare anyone too much that it muzzles itself. If you’re looking for a messy, bloody, unapologetic queer werewolf story, you might be better off rewatching Ginger Snaps and letting this one go lie down.
Verdict: A beautifully shot, emotionally earnest, aggressively declawed werewolf romance. Come for the concept, stay if you really love moody snow and longing glances; just don’t expect this animal to bite.
