The Wolf House Review

In the Western world, animation is primarily known as a kid's medium, which is a true shame. It's not that kid's movies can't be good - Pixar has proved that time and time again - but it's a severe limitation on the medium nonetheless. Even studios like Studio Laika, who push the envelop consistently with breathtakingly beautiful and impossibly complex stop motion animation, rarely if ever push boundaries with their storytelling - outside of Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, there's not all that much depth, and even those are still marketed towards family audiences.

Mostly, I've looked to Japan and Europe for more interesting animated output, but recently, two Chilean filmmakers, Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León, have come to blow everything else out of the water in terms of dedication and creativity. The result - a highly experimental horror-fable titled The Wolf House - is not the best animated film ever made, but in its own way it is simultaneously one of the most ambitious and most twisted.

Almost immediately, The Wolf House casts all expectations of an animated feature to the wind, opening with a mock propaganda piece for a vague commune in Chile called "The Colony," a place that apparently has dark rumors about it that are simply spread by those who are ignorant, according to a narrator. They introduce the rest of the film as a story of a girl named Maria who lived in the Colony, but who one day decided to escape.

This is where the nightmare begins.

The rest of the film takes place in a empty house Maria finds and takes up residence in, adopting two pigs as her own children while hiding from a wolf that stalks outside. It's a strange, twisted version of the story of the three little pigs that never fully feels as if it's telling its story upfront, but rather putting a thin, uncanny fairy tale veneer over a truly horrific reality.

The surface level story is told through character monologuing, as Maria and the wolf develop a dialogue with the viewer. Maria magically transforms her pigs into humans and raises them as children, and the wolf consistently beckons to them, planting seeds into her head that she can't make it on her own, she doesn't have what it takes to take care of herself and the pigs, and that she must return to him. The more one looks into this dynamic, the more insidious it becomes, as the wolf is quite literally a predator, an abuser who is looking to retake his victim back into his stomach, and wishes for her to come willingly no less.

All of this is underscored by the visual presentation of the film, which is an absolute masterclass in experimental stop motion animation. The film is shot throughout an entire house, where furniture, wall paintings and puppets interact with each other to create a dynamically evolving environment teeming with surreal horrors. Darkness and grime coat the house, moving of their own volition; the characters quite literally fall apart and look as if they're constantly on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. Even the clear views we get of what can resemble human characters look deathly ill, as if they're one day away from starving to death, or slowly being poisoned from within. Insidious shapes and faces appear along the walls, and all of it is edited to look like one long take, completely melting all sense of time and continuity into one lasting nightmare.

From the perspective of craft, this likely took nearly unprecedented levels of dedication and attention to detail, and to say it's an artistic accomplishment isn't close to doing it justice. It also turns this slightly sinister fairy tale into a living nightmare, a child's desperate attempt to rationalize her trauma through a fairy tale lens. The Colony is a cult, and the wolf is its leader, indoctrinating youth and abusing them physically and mentally, and though Maria is trying to break away, she cannot - not fully. Even in her refuge, she begins to create a family and home for herself through the only lens she knows how, indoctrinating her children with horror stories meant to prevent them from leaving, and setting them up as practical worshippers of her. All the time, the wolf is constantly circling, circling, taunting her failures and welcoming her back with his embrace.

The framing of this film as a propaganda piece adds more layers and questions. Through the perspective of the story, Maria is doomed to forever be a part of the wolf and the Colony, never truly being able to escape it both physically and psychologically. As much as she may rail against it, she's better off within it than without it, and as scary as the wolf may be, he still loves her and wants to care for her. Is this true? Not likely, but it exposes a crucial part of how cult propaganda works, normalizing the abuses of the cult and isolating them from the outside world, and instilling deep-seated fears and insecurities that convince them they could never escape, never be at home outside of their world again.

There's a real life basis behind the Colony; Colonia Dignidad, a German commune run by the infamous Paul Schäfer, under whom Colonia Dignidad became infamous for its wide variety of human rights abuses, from the sexual abuse of countless children to the torture of dissidents sanctioned by Chile's Pinochet regime - and more. There is an undercurrent of nazi symbolism in The Wolf House that reflects this, turning it into a poignant and scathing critique of the Pinochet regime and its complicity in the atrocities of Schäfer and his followers and adding a horror to this already potent nightmare that is all too real.

If there's any flaw that The Wolf House has, it's that it perhaps shouldn't have been a feature film. It's themes and spectacle both could have easily fit into a thirty to forty minutes short, and would have perhaps been better for it. As it stands, the sheer brilliance of the craft and the surreal atmosphere alone are enough to pull the audience in - if they can stomach it - but it may have been even better were it more concise.

This is truly a film that feels like a horrible fever dream, one where any amount of whimsicality that might be brought on by its fairy tale aesthetic is undermined by how truly dark and nasty it is. Beneath all of that is a real life horror that is confronted directly in surprising and subtle yet no less scathing ways. This definitely won't be one for everyone, but inside of The Wolf House's repellent depths is a truly daring, original and brilliant work.