About the film (courtesy of Focus Features):
Believing he is a wolf trapped in a human body, Jacob (George MacKay) eats, sleeps, and lives like a wolf – much to the shock of his family. When he’s sent to a clinic, Jacob and his animal-bound peers are forced to undergo increasingly extreme forms of ‘curative’ therapies. However once he meets the mysterious Wildcat (Lily-Rose Depp), and as their friendship blossoms into an undeniable infatuation, Jacob is faced with a challenge: will he renounce his true self for love.
Wolf is an international joint production film from Ireland and Poland. It premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival back in September and now it has made its way to American cinemas, something in which you may wish hadn’t happened in case you are thinking of hitting the theaters to see this. Every once in a while, you watch a movie and silently wonder, “how did this even get made?” This one might comfortably fall into that category.
I won’t be wasting my time here trying find redeeming qualities of this movie. Well except that they do have the decency of limiting the runtime to under 100 minutes, so there’s that. If you can’t tell this already, I was not a fan, not even a little, of this one. There must have been something lost in translation between what writer/director Nathalie Biancheri hoped to present and what is actually manifested on screen for audiences to experience. I, for one, was left scratching my head throughout and wondering if I just didn’t get it. Wolf is awfully hard to get behind and take it as a serious movie.
After doing a little digging, poking and prodding on the internet, I learned a new term, otherkin. According to Dictionary.com the definition of this word is someone who identifies as a non-human species or mythological entity. But as it turns out, this is NOT what’s going on the movie, Wolf. Instead, what our lovable fuzzy characters are dealing with is a medical condition called clinical lycanthropy, which is defined as a rare psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusion that the affected person can transform into, has transformed into, or is, an animal. Okay, got it?
Jacob (George MacKay), Wildcat (Lily-Rose Depp) and a host of others suffer from this affliction in Wolf and it’s up to The Zookeeper (Paddy Considine) to to get them to shed their imaginary animal skin and return to the real, functioning world. This plot is way out there and I doubt many people will be happy to go along for the ride, especially with the logical inconsistencies. I mean for starters, you’re an animal but you understand spoken words, can speak words to communicate with other species and humans AND you wear some sort of clothing – presumably dressing yourselves…okay what, do you identify as a cartoon animal? It’s thoughts like these that will keep audiences from taking this story seriously.
George MacKay, Lily-Rose Depp and Paddy Considine do give decent performances, but not enough to ignore everything else that’s going on with this feature. I do get that there are people out there that suffer from countless medical and psychological afflictions, but that doesn’t give Wolf a free pass to just waste my time, or yours. I’d urge anyone that is curious about seeing this to watch the trailer first and know what you’re getting into. You can only see this one in theaters right now but I’m guessing it’ll have a very short run before it’s soon available to endure at home.
