American Animals

By: Ashlee Dell

What happens when a bunch of suburban college students decide to steal priceless books of all things from the library of their university? Let’s just say it is one of the most unexpected crimes and doesn’t end well. Bart Layton’s American Animals premiered this past January and I had the opportunity to preview the film before it hits theaters next month.

American Animals is based on the true story of four college students from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky that band together to break in to their university’s special collections library. Why you ask? Because the special collections section includes four huge original edition folios of Birds of America by John James Audubon and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And yes, you heard that right – this actually happened during finals week during one fall semester of 2004.

The heist was originally a plan by two students and best friends Spencer (Barry Keoghan) and Warren (Evan Peters) that don’t know what to do with their lives. Warren originates the crime and they bring in two more students of Transylvania University, Eric (Jared Abrahamson) and Chas (Blake Jenner), when they realized they needed more help. According to the film and the real-life story, the four of them spent weeks concocting a plan of execution. The entire collection is guarded by one poor librarian in the Special Collections section, Betty Jean Gooch (Ann Dowd), or so they thought. What they were able to escape with even takes them to New York to try to sell what they got away with at Christie’s art auction house in Rockefeller Center. After some mistakes along the way, they all start to go a little…shall we say crazy? You may know how it ended afterwards, but the journey there was all the more entertaining.

What makes American Animals stand out is that the real men behind the story (as well as Betty Jean) are also featured as commentators in the film fourteen years after the outlandish crime occurred. Director Bart Layton’s documentary filmmaking background (“Locked Up Abroad” and The Imposter) adds an alluring and intriguing perspective in including this viewpoint and cuts to the real men at just the right moments.

One word to describe the film as a whole is suspenseful and the portrayal of the four students by Keoghan, Peters, Jenner and Abrahamson makes you want to keep watching. When their plans don’t turn out as they intended, anger ensues and you don’t know what to expect.

American Animals was also in part distributed by MoviePass and may set a tone for the future of film distribution with the ever-so-popular movie theater subscription service. Don’t miss this suspenseful film and make sure to stay until the end.