Misha and the Wolves

Misha and the Wolves is as much a documentary as it is a wrestling match: filmmaker versus subject, truth versus fiction. Ultimately, the viewer comes out the winner.

Despite a few narrative gaps that needed filling, Sam Hobkinson delivers a rollercoaster-ride of a documentary with superb characters, insightful talking heads and jaw-dropping plot twists.

The combination of archive footage, fresh interviews and extensive dramatic reconstructions is tightly edited. Hobinkson makes the most of a hugely involving story and a collection of fascinating individuals.

A puzzle box of a structure reveals fresh angles to the story with each new contributor, but the woman at its core – the discredited author Misha Defonseca – remains silent and unaccountable, to the film’s detriment.

It’s propulsively watchable if a tad light on reflection. And you may feel hoodwinked by one late reveal.

Misha's actual story is fascinating in its own way, but within the relative levity of Hobkinson's framework, her truth and trauma get lost in a detective yarn. The film lacks the heft to adequately explain the nuance of Misha's truth

Exploiting now-familiar techniques of documentary misdirection in the service of easy suspense, Misha and the Wolves wastes a golden opportunity to interrogate the slippery nature of historical truth (and a Herzog-worthy heroine along with it), opting instead to spin a self-satisfied yarn that offers little insight into anything beyond our natural tendency to believe the most ecstatic truths.