Zoo (2007) Critic Reviews

A breathtakingly original nonfiction work by Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor (whose "Police Beat" was among the highlights of Sundance's 2005 dramatic competition).Read the full review

Whether meaning to or not, Devor and his accomplished crew expand our concept of the documentary film, which relegates this documentary to art houses, not porn theaters.Read the full review

Compelling.Read the full review

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.Read the full review

It would have been easy to focus on the eroticism of horses, who, let's face it, are beautiful creatures to look at even for the nonzoophilically inclined, but Devor shows the animals only sparingly. For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself.Read the full review

Zoo is a cool sensibility married to a hot topic, a poetic film about a forbidden, unsettling subject. Elegantly made and eerily lyrical, it deals with what director Robinson Devor has accurately called "the last taboo, the boundary of something comprehensible."Read the full review

Paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.Read the full review