It took 30 years, but women in the movies are finally being allowed to be as debauched as the men

“We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!”

So goes the raucous demand of Richard E Grant’s eponymous toff in 1987’s Withnail and I.

Laura and Tyler, the hedonistic heroines of Animals, would be perfectly happy with the house white – but the same themes run through that film: co-dependency; self-destruction; friendship; nihilism. It’s taken 30 years, but women are finally being allowed to be as messy and debauched as the men.

“People leave either wanting a drink or never wanting to drink again,” said Alia Shawkat when I spoke to her ahead of the film’s release this week. She and Holliday Grainger star as two 30-somethings, whose close friendship is curdling into something more sour. Animals is a beautiful, bleak film. Its glass isn’t half-full, or half-empty, it’s full of whisky and being poured down someone’s throat.

Just as was the case with Withnail and I, the lead characters in Animals are not bad people, but they make bad decisions, say the wrong things, steal, cheat and get too wasted too often – just as men have been doing in cinema for decades. And they never particularly turn their life around.

Animals is part of a growing number of films and TV shows that allow their female protagonists to be unlikeable, but ask us to root for them anyway – that offer no glib platitudes on female friendship, but are more relatable and recognisable than most that have come before them: Fleabag; Wild Rose; Lady Bird; Daphne; The Edge of Seventeen; even The Favourite.

Long may it continue.

Yours,

Alexandra Pollard

Arts writer and commissioning editor