October 7th: The Wolf House
The Wolf House
Released: 2018
Directed by: Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña
Starring: Amalia Kassai, Reiner Krause
When I was a kid, there was a show on Nickelodeon called Pinwheel. It was a Sesame Street-style kids show with puppets and humans teaching lessons about how to be good people and had many shorts that came from the UK and Europe. Paddington. Pingu. The Magic Roundabout. Others. Many of them were stop motion, and many of them had a twinge of weirdness to them. Something unsettling. Uncomfortable. Like just this side of creepy. The Wolf House has a very similar sensation. Except it is very much on that side of creepy.
This is a movie with a literal and a figurative description of what is happening. I will start with the literal. A young girl named Maria lives in a German colony in Chile called the Colony. It is meant to be the ideal living — read: Aryan ideal (yuck). She loses some pigs and chases after them, getting lost. Chased also by a wolf, she escapes into a house where she finds two pigs. Slowly, she cares for those pigs and they turn into humans(!). After some growing into her role as mother to these “children,” she changes them to have the blonde hair and blue eyes to escape their “ugliness” of darker hair and darkened skin (double yuck). As time goes on, food gets scarce. And pigs, as we all know, will eat just about anything. So her “children” decide she will provide them one last meal: Maria herself. She is then saved by the Wolf and returns to the Colony.
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Now for the figurative, this is my interpretation. Not necessarily what the filmmakers intended. The movie starts by declaring that it has been produced thanks to the Colony. It is clearly propaganda. It is a story that they tell their little lieblings to scare them into staying in the Colony. In the propaganda speak, the pigs are native Chileans — non-Aryans (again, yuck). She follows some native Chileans out of the Colony and finds a place to stay. Somehow while out there in the non-Colony world, she has two children. The father is nowhere to be seen. They are “pigs” because they are not full Aryan (again, double yuck). The home has modern amenities: electricity, TV, modern clothes, running water, etc. She must have gotten to a city like Santiago or Valparaíso. Though she seemingly accepts and appreciates being away from the Colony, she slowly begins to conform her children to the Colony ideal. Feeding them the honey from the Colony. Their hair, skin tone and eye colors change to leave the “dark eyes of beasts” and “ugliness” (seriously this racially coded junk is gross). But more and more she feels tied down by them. They are taking from her more than they are providing for her. She abandons them, escaping back to the Colony. Back to, as the propaganda would say, the safety of home. The true horror of the film isn’t the unsettling feeling of the children, but the brainwashing of the cultish Colony itself.
Small Observations:
- It is interesting that the film flips from German to Spanish and back again. And that the Spanish is Chilean in dialect. As someone who speaks a bit and understands more, it is different than the Spanish I grew up learning.
- The visuals are constantly moving. It goes from two dimensional painting or relief-style clay to three dimensional claymation figures and dolls. The transitions between the different figures are part of what makes it unsettling as the figures melt away over and over again. Did the death of the Nome King in Return to Oz freak you out? Yeah, it’s a whole movie of that.
- The wolf talking to Maria the whole time is creepier than anything the children do. That includes tying her down with the intent of eating her. The wolf sounds like a guy who is planning awful and terrible things. And as he turns out to be the representation of a racist cult-commune…it tracks.
- MCU actors: 0
Overall Rank: A
This is a weird movie. Weird isn’t always bad. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it is a bit opaque. I had to do a lot of supposition to understand it. In any case, recommended.
