Wolf ★ ½ ☆☆☆ | Movie Review

Synopsis 


A legion of Roman soldiers goes in search of four missing messengers. They soon realise that a plague which is working its way through Caledonia is much worse than anything they've seen before.


Review 


Wolf was a very sneaky film, I'd seen nothing about it until a very enthusiastic social media marketing campaign where its poster appeared in at least 75% of the videos I watched for about a week before it was released.

The legion are alone in the forest battling against a foe that they can't see. Their fear is keeping them alive for now but as their numbers start to dwindle it becomes clear that the beast is more familiar than they originally thought.

Wolf was written and directed by Stuart Brennan who also starred as Grackus. I'm never quite sure how I feel about people who do this, I'm definitely no expert on the matter of course but I feel like you need to be a spectacular talent to direct something you're also acting in. Is it not quite unproductive not being able to see the entire scene happening? Anyway, I could waffle on that for a while about something I have barely researched so I'll save that for another time.

A lot of the acting in Wolf feels like it was from TV, and several of the parts wouldn't have been far off comedic roles in things made for network shows. The acting isn't the only thing that smacked of TV. The music is also not something you'd expect in this sort of thing, it would be much more suited to a crime drama. Occasionally I felt like it might have been perfect for this sort of historic piece but then it would quickly slip back to crime drama and I was almost completely distracted from the film.

As an idea it's an intriguing one. The outline of the story would make a good movie, it's simple and has lots of opportunities to be really effective on screen, unfortunately I don't think this delivered on that potential.

There's quite a spread of characters but some do get overlooked. Ima has a backstory that you can glean through context and Liviana has an implied story but both are only hinted at and nothing is used. Sometimes this is forgivable but with what happens with them both at the end of the film I think it's appalling that we don't get more from them.

This was yet another film that suffers from a black hole of time. There are a couple of points where they play fast and loose ad in one particular place it looks like they filmed at different times of day not accounting for the scenes timeline.

The location itself is stunning and you can see that repeatedly in the panning shots of forest... lots of forest, oh, and a mountain range. The first time it was nice, the second time it was a little cliche, and after that I started writing abuse in my notes.

The other thing that seems to be popular in Wolf is the blurry camera work. For the most part it looks intentional as it's part of the reveal but it's not isolated to that. Some of the fight scenes look like they might have been put together quite well but in one of the biggest of those you can't tell because the action is accompanied by camerawork that looks like it was done by someone hiccuping on a pogo stick.

My other major quibble is the ending. It seems very late in the game to be adding information to the story. There was even an opportunity to introduce the point earlier in the film but that was where we ignored Ima's backstory, looks like a lot of things could have been solved by changing that scene, it seems like a huge misstep.

It's not the worst film, but it's also not the best. There were some big opportunities for improvements but none of them were taken and ultimately this feels like a waste of a good story.

What you should do 


I wouldn't rush out to see this and I don't think I'd waste a post-it note on noting it for the future either.

Movie thing you wish you could take home 


The storyline to use as a creative writing project.

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