A family jungle in 'Animal Kingdom'

The imperiled innocent at the center of "Animal Kingdom," David Michod's startling debut feature from Australia, is Joshua, or J (James Frecheville).

When we meet him, he's beside Mum on the living-room couch, watching TV; Mum's been dead for some time. We've just met J, so it's hard to tell whether he's in shock or just stupid (as when he glances past the EMTs so he can keep watching his TV game show); whether this is the OD he's been long expecting, or whether there's something else.

Then Grandma shows up - the one nicknamed Smurf (Jacki Weaver), the one with the semi-rictus grin and the heart full of snake venom - and you know it's something else. J may be suffering the first-known case of pre-post-traumatic stress disorder.

The jungle of "Animal Kingdom" is Melbourne, and the beasts are the Codys - Smurf & Sons, who include the weak-willed Darren (Luke Ford), the coke-addled Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), who, in his relatively quiet-yet-sociopathic manner, may be the film's scariest character. After Smurf, who not only possesses a surfeit of evil but turns our universe upside down with her peculiar strain of maternal instinct.

But the entirety of "Animal Kingdom," and Michod's achievement of low-key, dry-throated apprehension, is about disorientation: J, who, in his innocence, becomes a threat to the mini-Cody empire, can't go to the police, either - unable to catch the Codys, they've begun killing them. J's only chance is through a maverick detective named Leckie (yet another terrific turn by Guy Pearce). As with most of what transpires here, you're never quite sure about "Animal Kingdom," which promotes family values, but only if your name happens to be Manson.