‘Wolf’ should’ve been a short film: Review

There’s a scene early in Wolf that captures the movie’s potential perfectly.

A young man (Darragh Shannon) says to his support group, “Hi, I’m Jeremy. And I am not a squirrel.” Recognition ripples throughout the room, accented by the appearance of a grumpy girl wearing a beak and feathers. It’s clear Jeremy would like to be a squirrel; he’s just struggling to accept that he’s not. The moment is funny, and there’s an impulse to laugh. 

But then, Jeremy cries out in anguish, “Please, please just let me be a squirrel!” He’s weeping, pleading, begging even. The pronounced mood swing is striking, and its point is obvious: People should have autonomy over their identities. Jeremy should be a squirrel if Jeremy wants to be a squirrel. 

It’s hard to watch, but the emotion feels necessary to drive the scene’s message home. Less justified is the torturous and monotonous cycle it triggers, which plagues the rest of the one hour and 38-minute movie. In a series of increasingly painful turns, Wolf makes the same important, but one-dimensional point time and time again. The intensity of watching that churn is fatiguing, bordering on demoralizing — despite some extraordinarily well rendered elements from writer-director Nathalie Biancheri.

George MacKay stars as Jacob, a young patient at a live-in “species identity disorder” facility. Jacob wants to be a wolf. Through his eyes, we’re introduced to what treatment for that unusual predilection entails, and meet a cast of characters grappling with their own animal alter egos. In addition to Jeremy the Squirrel, there’s Wildcat (Lily-Rose Depp), Dog (Fionn O’Shea), Parrot (Lola Petticrew), and more.

Aaannd we’re back to crawling around on the floor.
Credit: Focus Features

As you might expect, the doctor facilitating the group’s rehabilitation soon reveals himself to be cruel and callous. Paddy Considine plays the so-called Zookeeper as a relentlessly stern master, abusing those in his care by forcing their fantasies into absurd and even dangerous realities. For example: Wearing a massive prosthetic tail, Jeremy the Squirrel breaks his nails down to their beds when forced to scramble up a tree with his “paws.” He subsequently falls to the forest floor in a battered heap.

It’s awful, and it gets more awful. Patient after patient, the Zookeeper inflicts torture on these charming characters we know mainly by their animal aspirations. The result is an almost clinical progression of Wolf‘s story that isn’t so much scary as it is punishing. The visual means by which these horrors are achieved is haunting and the acting impressive. But amazing execution can’t outweigh the seeming lack of purpose behind these nightmarish torments. 

Beyond the obvious need for these patients to escape, there isn’t a compelling conflict in Wolf. There are clues to Biancheri’s obscure intentions with that approach, namely dialogue alluding to the difficulties facing transgender people. (For example: “I don’t live in the body I should” and “Everything I was learning as a child felt wrong.”) Still, the reasoning behind the excruciating progression of violence with no dramatic question to anchor it isn’t spelled out. 

Makeup wipes: Just another things cats don’t need.
Credit: Focus Features

MacKay finds layers in Jacob, elevating his inner conflict into an intriguing puzzle. Though that emotional nuance is regularly outsized by the physicality of his character’s blocking. (He spends much of the film on his hands and knees, at one point even wildly scaling the bars of a large cage, to underwhelming effect.) Depp too creates a compelling portrait of a young woman whose motivations never become clear, but add mystery to the film’s slower sections. Her role as Jacob’s love interest in the final act may be the most satisfying Wolf ever gets. 

Still, the brutality of the rising action is grating, particularly in a world so underdeveloped. Ultimately, the opening scene with Jeremy crying carries a moving essence the rest of the film can only mimic. Perhaps editing Wolf down to just that would have produced an exquisite short film. Though then you’d have to call it Squirrel. 

Wolf is in theaters.