Mark Reviews Movies: WOLF (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 2, 2021

The tone of Wolf, which involves a group of people who believe they are animals trapped inside human bodies, is right. Whether or not one believes such a mental health issue is real (There is some controversy on the matter, obviously), writer/director Nathalie Biancheri does believe it, treats it with sincerity and compassion, and attempts to find some sort of reconciliation with the notion in this movie. As a persuasive exercise, it is, well, persuasive. As a story, the movie is only fractionally formed.

The setting is almost exclusively a remote facility, specially created to deal with the treatment and, in the mind of the man who runs it, cure for so-called "species dysphoria." If people didn't claim to have this condition, one might be forgiven for seeing some allegory about gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other matter of what makes up a person's sense of self.

After all, here, in this fictional location that addresses a relatively obscure condition, we believe a lot of what happens—how the facility isolates its patients, how the staff works on its clients, how the patients react to and rebel against their treatment—because of real-world corollaries. How many of the techniques in this place look like guilt-based brainwashing? How much of the head doctor's beliefs in the superiority of human beings sound akin to some religious assertions? How much does one scene, in which the doctor zaps a patient with cattle prod, feel like the stories we hear of places that think electrical shocks can "cure" a person of homosexuality?

The point, perhaps, is that, while there probably isn't a place like this specific facility in the real world, it definitely seems real. That goes a long way to convincing us of the lackluster story's logic, at least.

We meet Jacob (George MacKay), a young man who is convinced that he is actually a wolf. MacKay's performance is credible in that regard, from its relative silence—observing his surroundings with the quiet intensity of a predator on the hunt and the heightened awareness of a potential target of destruction from humans—to the actor's fully invested physicality.

There are other patients in this place: Rufus (Fionn O'Shea), who believes he's a German Shepherd, and Judith (Lola Petticrew), who thinks she's a parrot, and Jeremy (Darragh Shannon), who imagines himself to be a squirrel, and several others. Their beliefs come and go with the various therapies enacted by Drs. Mann (Paddy Considine), nicknamed "the Zookeeper," and Angeli (Eileen Walsh), whose name suggests her relative care for these people. The other subjects' actions often feel like anthropomorphized pantomime, which Mann points out to Jeremy, when he makes the young man climb a tree (The doctor wants him to use his "claws," which has a predictably discomforting result).

Jacob's belief, though, seems to go much deeper. When he crawls on all fours in the woods or through the hallways of the facility at night, MacKay's sinewy movements suggest that the character's notion of himself as a wolf exists on some primal level—right into and displayed through his muscles and bones.

There isn't much in terms of a plot. Jacob arrives at the place, meets his fellow patients, insists to Mann and Angeli that he doesn't want to think of himself as a wolf, and spends his nights relaying his true feelings into a journal and stalking the halls low to the ground. He strikes up a friendship with Wildcat (Lily-Rose Depp), who also strays at night and acts like a cat (naturally), that gradually and unconvincingly (on both a dramatic level and as a matter of this cross-species belief) develops into more.

The doctors' belief is that this condition is the result of trauma—a defense mechanism and an escape complex, essentially. That seems to be the case for Wildcat, whose past is vaguely explained and whose present—as either a surrogate daughter or lover of Angeli—is even less clear. If the movie feels like an allegory beyond the philosophy and techniques of this facility, it's because Biancheri focuses more on the idea of this condition than any real specifics of its underlying causes. That makes Jacob less of a fully defined character (We meet his parents a couple of times and hear about some violence he may have committed) and more of an ideal form of proof. It makes the other characters, including Wildcat, into even less than that.

A few interesting ideas emerge from the premise and the basics of this treatment process. There are the aforementioned ones—that this place and its techniques mirror some real facilities and methods that seem founded upon humiliation and abuse. Mann, as played by Considine, is especially frightening in the way he can turn off and on his viciousness, and there is definitely something of note beneath this man's existence in the tale. He sees nature as an intrinsically harsh realm and animals as unthinkingly cruel entities, but what, then, does his conscious harshness and cruelty toward these people say about humanity itself?

Biancheri creates a credible world with Wolf. Like the more potent ideas here, the potential for a developed story, though, remains just beneath the surface and unexplored.

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