Blu-ray Review - The Wolfpack (2015)

Crystal Moselle’s fascinating documentary The Wolfpack is both a glance at the continuing ability of films to whisk us away from our lives, problems and selves, and offer us world well beyond our own; and an uncomfortable study of paranoia and mental abuse.

The seven Angulo children, six boys and one girl, have been raised in almost total isolation within their New York apartment. Home-schooled and forbidden to leave the confines of their flat more for more than a few precious days per year, the kids, raised by their fearful mother and stubborn patriarchal father, have gleaned much of their knowledge of the world by studiously watching thousands of movies. The boys’ most favoured pastime is to re-enact their favourite movies. Dressing up in sophisticated homemade costumes and using cobbled-together props, the kids have a penchant for Tarantino moves and, as we are introduced to the family, are recreating scenes from Reservoir Dogs.

The presence of an outsider among the pack, armed with a video camera, suggests that this insular lifestyle is perhaps deteriorating though. At some point preceding the beginning of filming, teenager Mukunda, feeling inspired by a viewing of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, decided to leave the apartment and explore his neighbourhood. The Wolfpack is therefore beginning to move towards a sense of normality and the strange arrangement that dominated their upbringing is beginning to fall apart.

Books, movies, music, comics and so much more allow us to escape into a fictional world if our own isn’t doing a great deal for us. In The Wolfpack we get a genuinely enthralling glimpse at a small group of individuals who have effectively been forced to live vicariously through their favourite characters. The brothers appear to be learning about themselves and their surroundings in something of a backwards fashion. Whereas, we would normally relate to something in fiction if it struck a chord with something we understood in reality, as we see the brothers experience New York City, all their frames of reference are call-backs to movies. After the flat is raided by armed police searching for illegal firearms, one of the brothers mentions the similarity to a scene in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. In a lovely scene the brothers visit the beach for the first time where one remarks on its similarity to Lawrence of Arabia.

And yet, for all this sense that the siblings are growing mentally and emotionally, there is still an awkward sense that something amounting to abuse has occurred here. Moselle spends some precious time interviewing the often elusive father figure, but the film seems to be interrogating his possibly fragile mental state rather less then we ourselves do. Moselle never preaches at her audience, but the film’s possible lack of investigation into the root causes of the situation seems naïve.

Even so, The Wolfpack remains a fascinating and poignant story.