Naked and free, Jacob (George MacKay) rolls around in the grass in the woods, heads up, howling. He is a wolf, he is happy, his pack is waiting for him. Then we find ourselves in the mental asylum where Jacob is turned in by his parents. There are people like him gathered here: people with lycanthropy, that is, those who think they are animals. Or, if you will, they really are animals in other people’s bodies. Jacob the wolf meets Rufus the sheepdog, Annalise the panda, and also a squirrel, a parrot, a horse, and a duck. A little later, the hero also meets Cecile, a feral cat (Lily Rose-Depp) who walks on her own.
Dr. Mann (Paddy Considine) is in charge of correcting the patients’ psyches. His methods are not very progressive. At best, the doctor asks the patient to climb a tree like a squirrel or fly like a bird, and when that fails, he states: “You are human. Also, the inhabitants of the “zoo” are yelled at, electroshocked, and kept in a cage on a chain. Most patients, like herbivorous animals, are easily intimidated and try to mimic. Problems arise, of course, with the wolf, the cat, and partly the sheepdog: Rufus sees Jacob as his hero.
Cecile lives at the clinic on not entirely clear-cut terms. She enjoys privileges unavailable to others, does not participate in group therapy, and is clearly hiding something. Cecile takes Jacob outside at night to howl at the moon, and a “wild” feeling develops between them. This, naturally, does not please the clinic administration. Jacob keeps looking into the woods, hears the call, and decides to rebel against Dr. Mann’s tyranny. The ridiculous and pathetic rebellion at the animal farm will be put down, with an ending partly reminiscent of the ending of George Orwell’s parable, but the accents on the differences between humans and beasts are given differently.
The werewolf is the oldest character in human mythology. Unlike, incidentally, the vampire, which was invented by European aristocratic literature of the century before last. The man-beast has always lived near us, and the wolf is perhaps his most popular incarnation. The werewolf is terrifying, but can evoke both pity and admiration. The wolf is a well-known masculine symbol; it is a dangerously aggressive sexuality. One might at least think of the film of the same name with Jack Nicholson or Neil Jordan’s In the Company of Wolves.
But there are cat people walking around somewhere: Catwoman from the Batman movies, as well as cat people in Jacques Tourneur and Paul Schroeder’s films. In Bianchery’s film, these sexualities meet, the respective scenes between McKay and Depp’s characters thrilling and repulsive at the same time, at the level of primal instinct.
The focus of the film, of course, is MacKay, who, alas, is not quite as good as a young Depp. The British actor has an amazing face. Like Max von Sydow, he looks like a character in a Northern Renaissance painter’s painting. The spiritualized and suffering almost face is certainly human. But maybe also the image of the eternally searching “steppe wolf.” The only character in the picture, Mackay, in his imitation of the beast is not funny at all. Try howling like a wolf so that it doesn’t look like child’s play or a drunken joke. He can do it.
He lives the life of his strange hero, when silent, he speaks, growls, and Mackay also has an amazing athletic shape, and he is quite mastered animalistic plastique. Paired with him, by the way, works Michael Dymek camera: nervously circling where Jacob “turns” into a wolf and watching intently where he becomes a man. When a story is understated or a hiccup occurs in the actors, the picture and McKay’s acting remedy the situation, taking us to a depth that may not actually have been intended.
If The Wolf had been about, as in the described and countless other examples of werewolf films, straight-up mysticism or sci-fi, we would have had more clues. Biancheri’s work sits somewhere between realism and social grotesque, which may raise questions about what exactly this lovely story says.
Since “Flight Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” if not before, the psychiatric hospital has been a metaphor for a sick society, where authority figures, represented by doctors, usually differed from the “sick” in the worst way. In “The Wolf” there also seems to be a certain social allusion: for example, to people with different gender identities or sexuality, who do not fit into the standards of society. Except that this association rather creates problems. After all, even the most progressive viewer is unlikely to say that a person who seriously considers himself a squirrel does not need psychiatric help. And even the most rigid retrograde would hardly liken a transsexual to a person who walks on all fours and urinates on the floor. Wherever you look, it’s embarrassing.