Josh, or J as he is known to family and friends, is a kid trying to survive the harsh circumstances of his life. When we first see him he’s passively watching the television with a passed out woman by his side. The paramedics burst in and ask what she took. “Heroin,” he utters as he continues to pay more attention to the banalities on the idiot box than to his dying mother on the sofa.
If that scene doesn’t jolt you with its impassivity, then the next one almost assuredly will. We see J on the phone saying, “Hi Grandma. Mom’s gone and ODed and she’s died.” When she responds, “Oh, are you all right?” we know everything we need to know about her. We imagine J has lived a grueling existence with a drug addict mother who, it should be noted, kept her son sheltered from his grandmother and uncles. James Frecheville plays him as a kid detached from life trying to find his place in a world that seems to have nothing but cold indifference toward him, a point somewhat clumsily made by the film’s title, Animal Kingdom, and the detective who tries to help him.
