At first, Jude (Dastmalchian) and his girlfriend Bobbie (Kim Shaw), hanging out in Chicago, sleeping in their car, looking for their next fix, seem like an adorable rom-com version of drug addicts. They hold hands as they walk down the street. Bobbie keeps all of her possessions in a child's metal lunch box. They go to the zoo together and look at lions and camels and tigers through the bars of the cage. (The constant animal imagery is on-the-nose in its symbolism, although it does lead to the overwhelming strangeness and beauty of the final shot.)  Neither of them are in touch with their families anymore. Calling home for help is no longer an option. Their lives have been pared down to such a sterile landscape that there is only room for each other, and for the drugs. 

This is not a "slippery slope" movie, like other stories about addicts. In "Animals," they are already at the bottom  of the slope. Taking place in a very condensed period of time, "Animals" features an alarming (and effective) swerve in mood, from the nearly-bucolic opening sequences, (blinking in the morning light into the camera flares, giggling over a successful con, the glory of the heroin high itself) to a more jagged and terrifying energy in the second half of the film.

Bobbie and Jude shoplift CDs and then sell them in order to buy drugs. She pretends to be a sex worker, setting up "dates" with random guys through an ad she and Jude placed in the paper. They end up conning a security guard over a fictional stolen laptop in a scam that is so complicated it almost reaches the slam-dunk of Moses and Addie Pray's money trick in "Paper Moon." But the scams get more dangerous. And without constant fixes throughout the day, the addiction becomes urgent, a wild animal that demands to be fed (in case you missed the symbolism of all the images of roaring lions and scratching gorillas sprinkled throughout.)

"Animals" was filmed in Chicago, and Schiffli and cinematographer Larkin Donley, use that unmistakable urban landscape to beautiful and haunting lengths. Bobbie and Jude live everywhere and nowhere. Down in the Loop, or in Lincoln Park, in Wrigleyville and elsewhere, life is bustling and social and crowded. Bobbie and Jude walk around on the fringes of all of that, huddled in the empty spaces between the cracks. They stroll along the lakefront, stepping over sunbathers, they try to score drugs on the emptied-out outskirts of the city where the avenues are wide and deserted. Chicago seems mainly unpopulated except for the two of them, a perfect portrayal of the self-absorbed world of drugs. John Heard has a nice cameo as a security guard who befriends Bobbie in a way that actually gets through to her, his kindness coming with no strings and no judgment. The cinematography is not flashy but Donley is responsive to striking contrasts between bleak empty lots with the gleaming skyline beyond, to different moods and shapes (Jude lying long and flat in a hospital bed, with the blue flat line of Lake Michigan out the window a perfect example). It's a beautiful-looking film.

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