The Wolf House (2018)

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com

I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid. So, of course, I watched it all the time. This was when MTV still played mostly music videos, and some of my favorites were the animated ones - music videos that took the song’s central theme and developed an entire story that, at its heart, wasn’t exactly a narrative interpretation of the lyrics, but spring-boarded into something creative and weird. One of the most memorable of these was the song “Sober” by Tool. In the video, a small humanoid living in a decaying house finds a box that triggers mind-altering effects, sending him drifting through his room and the house’s corridors as his body twitches and levitates. By the end, the box sits empty, and what it actually contained is left for the viewer to decide. I remember a pipe with what can only be described as intestines in it, too. Anyway, this is the first thing I thought of while watching The Wolf House.

María is a lazy, irresponsible girl living in an isolated Colony, and after she’s punished for not pulling her weight, she runs off into the woods, narrowly escaping a wolf by hiding out in an abandoned house. Two pigs live there, and as if the place is reading her mind, it reshapes itself into her ideal home while the pigs turn into a boy and a woman she names Ana and Pedro. The wolf keeps lurking outside, so they can’t really leave, but for a while the three of them are happy, with María brushing off the wolf’s attempts to lure her back and call the house a new kind of cage. Eventually the food runs out, and Ana and Pedro start acting cagey and hostile, even hiding meals from her. When she tries to slip out to find food herself, they stop her, insisting it’s safer to stay - and for the first time, María starts to miss the Colony, thinking the wolf might at least know the way home. Then Ana and Pedro tie her to a bed, and she realizes they mean to eat her, so she begs the wolf to save her. He breaks in, kills them both, and she turns into a bird and flies home. The film closes with the wolf noting that María’s back to being hardworking again, and he turns to the audience to offer the same deal to any “little pigs” watching.

Now, this all happens in what feels like one continuous shot, the scenes transforming the characters, house, and scenery through stop motion and hand-drawn animation, interspersed with some live action stuff few and far between. This is a really hard film to follow. I needed some help above just to fully summarize the plot, because the avant garde nature of the film sets up roadblocks to a traditional narrative. It’s not that the film is plotless - there’s clearly a fable in here, complete with a moral about labor and obedience baked right into the wolf’s closing monologue - it’s that the film seems almost uninterested in helping you track it while it’s happening. Transformations occur on a whim, time skips without warning, and motivations shift so abruptly that I often found myself worried I had missed something. There’s a difference between a film that’s intentionally disorienting and one that’s simply withholding, and this sometimes blurs that line. I wanted to surrender to the dream logic completely, but the story kept tugging at me to make sense of it, and the film wasn’t always interested in meeting me halfway.

At the same time, it is so visually impressive. The music, the ASMR-level narration, and the sound design complement the surreal structure of the film, creating a 75-minute vessel of nightmare fuel. Every room feels handmade and alive in the worst way, like the walls themselves are still deciding what they want to be. It’s the kind of film I’d recommend on craft alone, even while admitting the storytelling didn’t always work for me. It’s really a singular, unsettling piece of filmmaking that I respected more than I enjoyed.

3 out of 5 Stars