[rating=5.00]
At first glance, Wildling offers everything I typically love about horror and genre movies. Monsters? Check. Monsters as a metaphor for puberty and sexual awakening? Check. Brad Dourif? You’re damn right, check. On the surface, this is a film that works hard to win my adoration, and it very nearly did. Unfortunately, the film never manages to be as good as it is interesting, muddying the waters of what could have been a very fine monster movie.
Director and co-writer Fritz Bohm has certainly crafted a film fraught with mood and atmosphere, and some will no doubt be drawn in by the strength of the filmmaking alone. Cinematically, there’s certainly a lot to enjoy about Wildling, and Bohm has proven himself to have a strong eye for dark detail. Where the film ultimately falters is in its script, which unfolds in baffling ways and is littered with too much subpar dialogue.
That’s a shame because what’s good about Wildling could have been great. Instead, the strengths of the film end up buried beneath a multitude of faults that prevent the film from living up to its potential. Instead of the great film that could have been, we, instead, get a film that gets in its own way.
Bel Powley (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) plays Anna, a young girl who has spent her life chained in a single room by a man she calls Daddy (Dourif). “Daddy” tells Anna horrifying stories about werewolf creatures he calls Wildlings, convincing her that they had eaten all the children and that she is being locked up for her own good. After “Daddy” tries to kill himself one night, Anna finds herself thrust into the real world for the first time. She’s taken in by Sheriff Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler) who tries to show Anna how to live in modern society and navigate the perils of adolescence. Soon, strange realizations begin that reveal a horrifying truth about Anna’s past and the true nature of the fearsome Wildlings.
Essentially, Wildling is a riff on the werewolf mythos, with slight variation. Werewolves are a monster that could certainly stand to be updated for the modern error, and Bohm makes a valiant attempt, even if the end result ultimately falters. Powley gives an intriguing, nuanced performance as Anna, playing the girl with an equal mix of wide-eyed wonder and feral curiosity. With a better script, this could have been something truly magical.
As is, it’s too hard to overlook the flaws that are peppered throughout the film. Characters exist seemingly because Bohm needs them to, not because they serve any real purpose to the narrative, and the characters that do make sense too often behave in baffling, contrived ways. (One moment, “Daddy is confined to a hospital, bandaged and seemingly barely alive, the next he’s running around as resident monster slayer, for example.)
Contrivance is a running theme throughout Wildling and often keeps it from attaining the heights for which it is so clearly reaching. Why would any police department allow a sheriff to take home a girl who’s been abused and held in captivity? Why is seemingly no one else monitoring the welfare of a half-feral teenager? All these little details add up to an impassable block, preventing it from becoming the film it could have been.
A shame, because there are moments of genuine terror mixed in with a healthy dose of existential terror. There are bits of good old fashioned horror gore effects that might please fans of hold school monster movies, but they’re too few and far between to allow Wildling to become the movie it wants to be. In the end, we’re left with a film that has the best intentions but lacks in execution.
