Auf of my soul: review of the movie "Wolf"
George McKay and Lily Rose Depp howl at the moon.
While most young men wonder "what is it to be human?", Jacob (George McKay) is determined that he prefers to live in the body of a wolf. To howl the nights away, to run barefoot in the mud and growl at his enemies - simply put, to take the best of Skarsgard in "Varyag" and repeat it in the twenty-first century. Such sensual impulses are not welcomed by the boy's parents - so he becomes a patient on the rehab, along with a parrot (Lola Petticrew), a squirrel (Daragh Shannon), a German shepherd (Fionn O'Shea) and a wildcat (Lily Rose Depp).
Zooanthropy is an unconventional disorder, but it has become covered in a dense layer of mythologemes: where there is skin wool even mentally, one step remains to a werewolf, and this is a completely different cinematic matter. Natalie Biancheri's debut feature is far from fiction and gothic novels: the filmmaker initially wanted to make a documentary, but found no consensus in the scientific community on the issue and switched from facts to artistic reflection. In "Wolf" the attempts to get into someone else's skin literally amount to a desperate desire to escape from the experiences and through animal instincts to express their needs: banal, and therefore understandable - in love, attention, security, care.
Like many debutantes in the genre close to the horror (like Hannah Bergholm or Natalie Erika James), Natalie Biancheri turns to the language of the body. Plastique becomes the only way to pronounce the inner state: while the young people express their experiences through movements, gestures, and abrupt turns of the head, the hospital staff clings to the self-value of words. The world of some and the world of others are contrasted on several planes: normal/ abnormal, savage/civilized, adult/young. "Beastliness" is condemned as barbarism (there are clips on TV about how not to behave), while, of course, the most horrible monster Biancheri draws humans. While the patients bury the dead animal (a dog by birth, not by thought) and try to be empathic, the luminary of experimental medicine and zookeeper (Paddy Considine) offers completely "wild" methods of healing.
Unfortunately, many of the ideological passages sound more convincing in this text than on the screen: zooanthropy remains zooanthropy and does not reach the normalization of all otherness and vulnerability. The choreographed scenes of training, escapes, and punishments turn into an overview tour of a rehabilitation center. Bianchery has inherited a contemplative stance from the original documentary, which is why the film turns into an airing of "In the Animal World." The dramaturgy recedes into the background, the narrative is given over to gut feelings, emotions, outbursts of aggression or passion. At the same time, the chaos within the walls of the asylum exists in strict order within the frame, keeping the picture from crossing the threshold of non-return strangeness. As a result, "Wolf" becomes a visually accurate and stylistically solid film (one can feel the director's attraction to Yorgos Lanthimos), but poor in postscripts: man to man is a wolf, only centaurs survive, and the cat, as before, walks on its own.
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