Animal Kingdom is a 2010 Australian neo-noir crime drama film written and directed by David Michôd and starring Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, James Frecheville, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver, and Sullivan Stapleton. Michôd's script was inspired by events that involved the Pettingill criminal family of Melbourne, Victoria. In 1991, two brothers Trevor Pettingill and Victor Peirce (along with two other men: Anthony Leigh Farrell and Peter David McEvoy) were acquitted in the 1988 shooting murder of two Victorian police officers.