Mark Reviews Movies: WILDCAT (2022)

Wildcat, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 20, 2022

The simple story would entail the military veteran overcoming his trauma by training an orphaned ocelot and the daughter of an abusive alcoholic learning to trust by way of her relationship with the veteran. Life is rarely, if ever, that simple, and Wildcat lets us see how complex, disturbing, and upsetting the processes of trying to heal emotionally and psychologically can be.

There are times that this film, directed by Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh, is uncomfortable to watch. Such is both the focus on these people and the access the filmmakers have been granted by their subjects.

We get to know Harry Turner, the British military vet who's service in Afghanistan has resulted in depression and a dangerous habit of self-harm, and Samantha Zwicker, who runs a wildlife rescue organization in the Amazon rain forest in Peru and knows all too well how one person can seem like two completely different people depending on the circumstances. Because we get to know them, we want these two people to succeed, thrive, and find some way to heal through their connection to nature and to each other, but because very few things in life work out that simply, we watch a pair of co-dependent relationships with increasing concern and fear.

Turner ran away from his home and family after attempting suicide, and in Peru, he met Zwicker, a doctorate student who devotes most of her time to rehabilitating animals to a life in the wild in the rain forest. The two become great friends and have a romantic relationship by the time Zwicker's rescue receives a baby ocelot, rescued from a logging site. Turner makes it his goal to be the first to train a wildcat kitten to integrate into the wild.

He becomes attached to the cat—and another—with a level of care that is admirable at first, but when tragedy strikes, Turner's dedication to his task becomes a void that he cannot fill on his own, with Zwicker's attention and affection, or with the work at hand. Another opportunity to raise an ocelot and prepare it for a life in the wild emerges, and Turner's initial hope for redemption becomes desperation and obsession.

The filmmakers use footage recorded by Turner to show the training process for the ocelot (It's rather astonishing and, because this is a wild animal, frightening stuff at times), and as his personal investment in the animals becomes deeper, the recordings become more confessional, vulnerable, and worrisome. Apart from the cat, Frost and Lesh's documentary becomes a fly-on-the-wall account of the slow but steady collapse of the human relationship—one that Zwicker later realizes, because of her family history, she should have seen as toxic.

Wildcat begins as an intimate study of how activism, living with nature, and love can bring some solace to troubled people. As it proceeds, though, the film offers a first-hand depiction of how some solace simply isn't enough.

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