Wolf review: George MacKay unleashes the beast in a movie about our feral sides

Films like MarrowboneAnd 1917George MacKay’s steady rise to prominence has been a testament to his physicality as well as the danger, fragility and braggadocio that he brings from it. The dizzying drama Wolf, it’s impossible to look away from him. His underseen brought forth the spontaneity, sensuality and carnality. The Kelly Gang: True StoryIt is back in Wolf. Once again, MacKay’s work forms the film’s emotional heart. Writer-director ​​Nathalie Biancheri enjoys pushing his character to the absolute limit, and MacKay is up to the challenge.

You might find some elements in the movie a bit silly. Biancheri evokes Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ LobsterIt is a surreal vision of a mental hospital run by professionals who love to abuse their patients. Children and teenagers who’ve been convinced they identify with certain animals run around wearing oversized plush tails and paws, neighing or quacking, and otherwise adopting the mannerisms of their chosen animals. McKay, however, is what keeps them grounded. Wolf Avoid mockery. His rigidity and inflexibility can be seen one minute, and his fluidity and lightness the next. His snarling stalking character is played perfectly straight by him, putting all his effort into his expressive reactivity as well as his powerful body language. It is easy to forget the strength of his performance. Wolf’s repetitive script and its vague development for supporting characters.

Biancheri focuses on Jacob MacKay (a twenty-something nude introduced in the forest), foraging on all fours while sniffing the air and rolling around in dirt, leaves, grass and dirt. The tension between the joy Jacob exudes and the “Wait, what?” confusion inspired by his behavior are the narrative thrust of Wolf, which focuses on the time Jacob spends in a “curative” clinic. Jacob believes he’s a wolf, and he wants to leave society and live in the woods. His parents are terrified he won’t lead a normal life because of what they perceive to be his mental illness.

Conor Horgan/Focus Images

Other patients, believing themselves to be parrots or horses, are also present at the clinic for months and years. They’re all under the control of the Zookeeper (a surprisingly terrifying Paddy Considine), a doctor who believes in punishing and humiliating his patients to break out of what he considers their delusions. The Zookeeper will use every action taken by the teens and children against them. The Zookeeper encourages the children and teens to keep journals detailing their feelings about their animal-human selves. He then reads these journals out loud to his peers. Considine’s line delivery of “My penis, it dangles down, gross and floppy” while reading Jacob’s journal, and MacKay’s accompanying look of resignation turned into fury, captures the push and pull between these two men. The Zookeeper thinks he’s a savior, but the clinic’s patients don’t exactly want to be saved. How could a compromise be reached to end this schism What kind of manipulation could it be?

The brief mention of species identification disorder (or species dysphoria) is in The Hunger Games Franchise, was the source of many jokes It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But WolfThis article focuses on the reasons these patients feel that way and less on how they are treated. It leads to some awkward characterizations. Wildcat, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is a mysterious patient who lives at the clinic alongside one of the doctors. The only recurring thing we learn about her is how fully her guardian has convinced her that human men will sexually abuse her, with statements like “Don’t you remember what happens to pretty girls like you that have nothing?” Wildcat repeats that lesson as “Do you know what happens to girls like me out there?” That’s a thought-provoking suggestion about the differences between animals and humans that the film renders only simplistically, where Biancheri could have pushed further.

Although the general strokes are of Wolf and the ways certain characters face off or pair up are predictable, Biancheri elevates the proceedings with visual language that emphasizes the characters’ loneliness. The question isn’t how authentic they are in their belief that they’re actually animals, but how people in power and authority act when their understanding of the world is challenged.

Wolf That uncertainty is surrounded by tension and fear. To force his patients into submission, the Zookeeper makes them wear leashes. A scene that bounces bounce back and forth between the Zookeeper’s torture of Jacob and another doctor leading the other patients in an overly loud, grotesquely silly dance class emphasizes the hypocrisy and inefficiency of this place and its tactics. During the patients’ meal time, the clinic plays videos of a snake slowly eating a frog, incrementally inching up its body, and lions feasting on a felled animal, blood matting in their fur and dulling their teeth. Wolf positions the clinic’s attempts to build fear in their patients so they amplify our anxiety, too. It’s an effective technique.

Foto by Focus Features

But it’s not all about. Wolf truly relies on MacKay, who has to be convincing enough in his at-odds identity to simultaneously draw viewers’ empathy and promote their unease. And he is, for every minute of this film’s 98-minute run time. Even as Wolf places him in situations that play to the most simplistic understandings of certain animals, MacKay captures the disconnect at Jacob’s core. Biancheri captures his discomfort with wide compositions in nighttime scenes where he stretches his arms off the mattress and struggles to control his natural urge to howl at God. We can also see the transformation in his body through close-ups.

The sound design helps, too: the dull thunk of his body as he helplessly throws himself around a cage, and the hoarse snarl of his growls as he advances on Depp’s Wildcat, with minor variations in tone taking his character from curious to aroused. Whatever the film’s flaws may be, none of them comes from this actor or this performance. “There is always a point of no return,” the Zookeeper says. MacKay proves that with his incredible turn in Wolf.

WolfLimited theatrical release Friday, December 3.