The world of marital relationships is fertile ground for cinema. Dramas, comedies, thrillers, horror, suspense- you name it. Every genre has produced films that draw from the complex world of human relationships and life as a couple. The Dominican film Animales (2026), directed by José Ramón Alamá, ventures into this territory with a dark comedy built around three marriages whose individual problems come together to create the perfect storm.
Martín (Frank Perozo) and Deborah (Vitaly Sánchez), Santiago (David Maler) and Sofía (Pamela Sued), and Franco (Pedro Manuel Casals) and Amelia (Nashla Bogaert) make up the three couples at the center of José Ramón Alamá’s story. On the surface, we can see that there are cracks in these relationships, along with possibly repressed feelings. With this bait, the story draws the audience into a true roller coaster of complications. The humor comes from the misfortunes of each of these characters. The unhappiness and misfortune of Martín, Deborah, Santiago, Sofía, Franco, and Amelia are so familiar that the laughter comes easily through this perverse brand of dark humor.
Animales makes very good use of the interaction between its six central characters. It creates strong chemistry while balancing physical comedy with well-structured dialogue. Franco and Martín provide some of the film’s strongest comic moments, while on the female side, Pamela Sued’s Sofía takes the lead. The story’s main fuel is the suspense created by the information the audience knows, but the characters are kept unaware of. The action is driven by infidelities and secrets that continue to escalate until they become impossible to contain. It is a bomb beneath the table, ready to explode, and everyone knows it except our protagonists, to paraphrase Hitchcock.
The carefully crafted production design is complemented by sequences that work better than others, as well as individual performances that elevate certain moments. The operatic tone of the score works unevenly: at times it is the perfect complement to a scene, while on other occasions it becomes overwhelming. The screenplay builds toward a climax that is structured correctly and effectively, but it loses some of its impact with an ending that becomes somewhat didactic, followed by an entirely unnecessary epilogue.
Animales finds in dark comedy the perfect vehicle to explore hypocrisy, human shortcomings, and the secrets hidden behind carefully maintained facades. It seeks to construct a complicated game of situations that pushes its characters to the limit, although those situations are not always resolved with the same degree of force. Perhaps the laughter comes from a misfortune that seems distant yet ultimately becomes a mirror of our own reality.