Wolf

Practically everything 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.

Writer-director Nathalie Biancheri treats this potentially sensational material with sensitivity and empathy, though Wolf sometimes careens in the direction of a pure horror film and introduces some late elements that border on the grotesque and seem superfluous to the main story. Still, this is an involving and dark fairy tale, with great performances from MacKay and Depp.

Equal parts captivating and cringey, writer/director Nathalie Biancheri’s Wolf flounders in the face of articulating its own thesis.

But for as much writer/director Biancheri pumps copious ideas into this concept, the solemn tone and lack of thematic focus renders the overwrought outing underwhelming.

What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

A shockingly dull look at a fascinating disorder affecting humans who believe they were born into the wrong species.

At first glance it might seem that this film has a humorous vein, and it's not for lack of seriousness, far from it, but rather that it struggles to explore those emotions adequately. Ideas abound because the concept allows for it, but the story and its director take themselves too seriously and the lack of focus makes the film seem more satirical than disciplined or serious. The acting is reliable as far as they go, especially George MacKay's committed performance, but in more general matters, the allegory explored in my own interpretation is deficient, and therefore soon becomes tiresome. Defective.

(Mauro Lanari) That clinical lycanthropy is chosen as an allegory to tell something else is understood as soon as one sees the behavioral therapy adopted in the rehabilitation clinic, even before Paddy Considine enters the scene in the role of the villain. In "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" of '75, Forman made the nurse Mildred Ratched played by Louise Fletcher evil, but this time the director is a woman and "canis canem non est". Moreover, Nathalie Biancheri's thesis is neither in favor of anti-psychiatry nor of the depathologization of SID ("Species Identity Disorder"), a change that has already occurred with the elimination of the word "disorder" in the new label "species dysphoria". Here the bad guys are first of all the parents who want to normalize their children (all the patients in the clinic are young teenagers), then there is the ecological attack on Hobbes: would human beings be like wolves when instead we would be the worst of the animals? Idea similar to Rousseau's myth of the noble savage ("Émile", 1762), although treated with a style very far from that of Truffaut in "L'Enfant sauvage" (1972). Finally she wanders between quotes from Hannibal Lecter and "Rumble Fish" (Coppola 1983), a bit haphazardly and with a lot of presumption. I would be happy if someone clearly explained that, beyond binary logic, there is still it, albeit at a metalevel (the eccentrics opposed to the conformists). Do I ask too much?

Being weird and artsy doesn’t make it good. It’s a badly told but at times well acted and well shot “art house” film

BEARly watchable, boring mess. Juvenile, ideological propaganda. Treats mental illness as a metaphor for oppression against minorities. The sexual intercourse between the two main characters looked like "furry" fetish. The film tries to say that if somebody feels like a horse, we should all pretend that he's a horse for his sake. Enough of this stupidity. You don't have to participate in other people's delusions. Humans are not other animals. That's the biological truth. The only thing that made sense was Lilly Depp's character worrying about living outside of the psychiatric center in the last scene. I'm sorry for George MacKay. He's a brilliant young actor. He did what he could to be convincing in this role. His wolf walk was amazing. Unfortunately this film does a disservice to real psychiatric issues and to trans community. Because when you show species dysphoria in such ridiculous manner how can you demand people treat gender dysphoria as a serious matter? Extremely woke and very bad movie.

Zero for concept. What is this, some kind of otherkin oppression saga, LMAO! I mean, that would be amazing; a documentary of **** getting put into therapy for their dumbass otherkin shenanigans. I can see those folks gravitating toward this, so congrats on making it the best movie for like two dozen weirdos. I have to watch it now.