A fabulistic streak tints the proceedings of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, David Verbeek’s ninth feature, with a sheen of greyscale anonymity that lays the foundations for an apocalyptic fairytale. This designation itself harbors a tension between the primordial chaos of an order turned to ashes and the marvelous fancies of make-believe, but both elements arguably point to the same elemental caprice that arises out of creation and destruction alike. Under caprice, lines drawn are dashed out, and borders unsparingly crossed; the plausibility of taming humanity from animality thus stems, perhaps, from a commitment to this creative logic. In our case, a feral wolf-like girl-child, played by Jessica Reynolds (of Kneecap fame), is torn apart from the forest in which she cavorts and thrust into the spotlight of human civilization, where she is affixed — successfully and otherwise — to various names and identities. Her transformation, as put by someone, is indeed “practically a miracle.”
That The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard begins not with her, but an unrelated and quickly irrelevant (human) character, demonstrates a rare sleight of hand in a film largely beholden to the clunky import of ideas. Operating in the vein of an intellectual thesis, Verbeek’s screenplay foregrounds the dividing line between animal and human progressively as its titular lupine sheds her baser instincts for the profits of language. Having first been taken in by some researchers, including a Japanese woman named Tanaka (Naomi Kawase) who doubles as the film’s offscreen narrator, Wolf Girl becomes “One” when abducted by a couple drunk on their forebodings of ecological disaster and plastered with grandiose delusions. Her adoptive parents, Wyona (Marie Jung) and Ellias (Nicholas Pinnock), entitle themselves as Fox and Leopard respectively, living in self-sufficient isolation on an oil rig. Their “New World,” in contrast with the selfish pessimism of modernity, opens up a space for both the Wolf’s self-actualization and her more insidious indoctrination.
When coming to face with pure, pristine animality, how should description begin, even before the prospect of communication? “Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness,” Jacques Derrida wrote, “the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked,” in direct opposition to the self-conscious shame in man’s “sense of nakedness.” Derrida’s profile of the human animal does not reduce humanity to its bestial roots so much as it renders problematic the absolute othering of its immodest subjects; for Verbeek, similarly, the Wolf is no mere brute despite her brutality, and her existence serves as a conduit for several ideas. Ranging from the metaphysical distinction between humanity and inhumanity to the civilizing and socializing processes of the former, the ideas of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard teem with exuberant potential in every frame of its first half, with Reynolds’ wide-eyed glances and darts eliciting from the viewer no little sympathy. Though not a literal wolf, she adopts the conceit of one, and one might expect an endlessly fascinating deconstruction of reason and appetite to ensue.
This expectation, regrettably, slumps into the simplistic realm of parable, and though much of the film’s daring premise proves commendable, it does not quite wrestle with the ideas it generates, opting instead to propound them leadenly and all too foreseeably. By the time the Wolf realizes her captivity and breaks free from the rig, she’s integrated — we don’t see how — into modern society, having proficiently acquired speech and now working a dead-end cashier’s job. It’s ostensibly a simple, quietly blissful life for the now-christened Alice, whose unfamiliarity with social cues possibly situates her near or on the spectrum, but Verbeek’s indulgence in plot mechanics over character observation lamentably forces us to reckon with some heavy-handed moralizing. “Society doesn’t teach us how to lie,” her would-be guardians had mused at one point, “It’s in us all.” But the film follows up on few of its aphorisms, and in spite of its radical origins, it remains fundamentally an aseptic and bloated critique of human reason.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 4.
Comments are closed.