In Australian director Sophie Hyde’s new drama, Holliday Grainger (The Borgias, My Cousin Rachel, Strike) and Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Transparent) star as two hard-partying thirty-somethings, whose friendship suffers a setback when one of them finds love.

Adapted by Emma Jane Unsworth from her 2014 best-selling novel of the same name, the film offers a refreshing take on the subject of female friendship, which it tackles with a great deal of tenderness and impressive honesty.

Moving the action away from the novel’s original Manchester setting to Dublin, the film follows the trials and tribulations of aspiring writer Laura (Grainger) and her reckless flatmate, barista Tyler (Shawkat) as they drink, snort and sleep their way through the Irish capital without a care in the world.

The two find themselves at a crossroads as Laura begins to question her choices in life, after realising that she has spent a decade attempting to write her first novel and failing miserably.

Things are further complicated when Laura meets and falls for handsome and wholesome classical concert pianist Jim (Fra Fee) whose drink- and drug-free lifestyle is a million miles away from her own chaotic and co-dependent friendship with Tyler.

Hyde and Unsworth present an unreservedly engaging, beautifully observed and robustly acted dramatic comedy that is only slightly let down by its inability to fully break away from Unsworth’s original source material. And, while not all of it works, it still remains one of the bravest adaptations of the year so far.

Steering the story away from clichéd narrative tropes and needless exposition and opting instead for a deliberately poetic style, Sophie Hyde has done a great job in trusting audiences to make up their own minds without feeling the need to spoon-feed them every single bit of superfluous detail.

Grainger, who impressed greatly early in her career as Lucrezia Borgia in Neil Jordan’s TV series The Borgias, gives a mesmeric and electrifying turn as a young woman who just can’t seem to find the right balance between the person she is and who others want her to be.

Shawkat gives a measured, enthusiastic and tragi-comic turn as the complicated Tyler.

At 105 minutes, Animals does feel needlessly overlong and too laboured in places to flow naturally, but the film is well worth catching for the way it presents a beautifully unconventional, funny and heartbreaking account of female friendship.