Ben Affleck's sixth directorial outing has a promising premise, a seasoned cast and the inevitable reckoning that comes with a thriller. What it criminally lacks, though, is the bite.

'Animals' begins with a deliciously uncomfortable premise. Mark Kimball (Affleck) is an Independent candidate for the Los Angeles mayoral office, selling the electorate a vision of decency and progress. Through promotional videos and speeches that say everything except anything of substance, he has built a campaign into which he has poured his family's money and which he cannot afford to lose.

The mayoral hopeful - who has somehow also been a teacher, is a Gulf War veteran and ran a successful law practice - finds his carefully assembled life under siege when his son is kidnapped. With his psychologist wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), he has only hours to raise the ransom. As the clock ticks, cracks in their marriage emerge, along with secrets each has kept from the other.

The catch? The abducted child is actually the son of their Latino nanny. A crisis of privilege arrives disguised as a family emergency, complicated by the fact that the boy's father is undocumented and Mark is actively courting the Latino vote.

There is a film worth making here. How much of morality survives when the stakes are high enough? When the powerful are forced to confront the precarity they ordinarily outsource to the less fortunate, does conscience prevail, or does self-preservation simply acquire better public relations?

'Animals' raises these questions with the solemnity of a political manifesto, only to leave most of them wandering about without answers. It is a thriller more interested in the appearance of tension than in generating any.

Shot largely inside Mark's blandly expensive home, the film finds director and co-writer Affleck caught between domestic drama and a stubborn insistence on realism. What emerges is neither particularly convincing nor especially compelling. With all the theatre and spectacle sucked out, much of the film plays like a long reel of people talking over one another in bad lighting.

The film wants to be a kidnapping thriller, a dissection of privilege and a marital drama, all while peering into the moral abyss between public virtue and private interest. Unfortunately, its ambitions are considerably more arresting than its execution.

Tension comes and goes, domestic confrontations grow tiresome, and the screenplay repeatedly mistakes introducing a moral dilemma for exploring it. Characters circle their secrets and betrayals without acquiring the complexity needed to make their eventual revelations matter.

Worse, a seasoned cast, including Affleck and Washington, is seldom given much to play with. No dialogue is written to land heavy, while the thin backstories leave little reason to care about the people delivering it.

Steven Yeun, as Mark's right-hand man Sam, and Adriana Paz and Luis Gerardo Méndez, as the nanny and her husband, do what they can with middling material.

The most underserved, however, is Gillian Anderson, easily the film's standout. As a mysterious fixer who introduces herself as Dayle Burton, Anderson is menacing, crisp and restrained. Her cut-throat delivery slices through the surrounding tedium like a scalpel. One only wishes the screenplay had allowed her character a little more camp, a little more intrigue and considerably more room to wreak havoc.

'Animals' is a bloodless outing, enamoured with its own pretensions of intellect to sink its teeth into the very questions it raises. The premise deserved a beast. What it gets is a house pet.