The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
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. — MORRIS YANG
In this gluttonous age of streaming, where art of all forms is cannibalized by the film industry in pursuit of content, the more particular art of adaptation has become all but a lost skill. Gone are the days where works of literature were made to prove enduring popularity or renown, or were vetted for their perceived adaptability, or had their rights held until a prestige director signed up to guide them toward awards glory. In fact, not only have such hurdles been largely removed from the track, but the publishing industry writ large has been remade in the wake of Hollywood’s reliance on outsourced creativity and original stories — to the degree that a sizable slice of the book industry’s production feels designed specifically with the aim of adaptation in mind. So it’s worth taking note these days when a left-field adaptation upsets the curated, seemingly assembly-line approach to literary translation and reaches the finish line, particularly when said film is made outside the studio system.
Rob Petit’s feature debut, Underland, is one such curio. Adapted and taking its title from Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 work of natural science nonfiction, Underland the film is a distinctly sensorial project, its general shape more inspired by the material spaces represented in the original text than in attempting any kind of direct interpretation. Which makes sense, as Macfarlane’s book isn’t a logical choice for the cinematic treatment — if anything, its episodic approach and emphasis on exploring the tactility and surreality of underground places would seem to lend itself better to the kind of serialized, nonfiction TV series that streaming services release with pace. Indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more surprising it becomes that the British Macfarlane’s book — the core of which concerns itself with the Jonas Salk maxim of being “good ancestors” — wasn’t instead spun up into the latest David Attenborough-narrated docu-series of bio-/eco-/climatological survey.
To that end, Petit’s Underland couldn’t be much different, condensing Macfarlane’s 500 pages into less than 80 minutes. And in some ways, this must have been a practical choice: Underland the book, subtitled A Deep Time Journey, might best be described as a eco-minded travelogue, with the author exploring various subterranean locales — from caves to catacombs, the Karst plateau to a glacier’s moulin, and even an underground laboratory seeking evidence of dark matter — and ruminating on the irreversible effects, geological and otherwise, of the Anthropocene on the planet’s past and future. A nature writer by trade, Macfarlane’s language blends poetic description of the natural world’s most hidden spaces with prose that tends toward the philosophical: “Into the Underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” Critics of the book, then, are likely to cite a certain existential ponderousness, but that particular quality, combined with the lack of a logical path for translating the text to the film medium, frees up Petit to craft a more aesthetic than expositional work, taking inspiration from and extracting the richness of the book’s various settings while largely setting aside its more discursive interests.
But while this approach allows the film to embrace a more abstracted style, it also shears off too much of the book’s thematic heft. Macfarlane’s penchant for the poetic is at least suitably matched in Petit’s roving, hypnotic belowground visuals and the film’s droning, spectral soundscape, but there are also moments where even these otherwise riveting elements can begin to feel a bit artificial when applied to otherwise purely observation footage. Perhaps that’s a byproduct of how much more narrow the director’s scope is than the author’s, and this may all ultimately be more of a semantic argument, as those unfamiliar with the source material will likely have less qualms with the admittedly captivating work that Petit delivers. Still, even viewers uninitiated with Macfarlane’s book will likely sense the film’s gossamer construction and Petit’s distrust in a purely visual art object, particularly as Sandra Hüller’s narration begins to work overtime in introducing and emphasizing the most rhetorical of Macfarlane’s text. But for those able to disassociate Underland the movie from Underland the book, Petit’s final product executes a mostly successful style-as-substance artistry and reflects a richer and more rewarding approach to both documentary filmmaking and cinematic adaptation than one is like to find much of these days. — LUKE GORHAM
How to Train Your Dragon
Cinematographer Bill Pope must have done something awful in 2022. Maybe he ran over some studio executive’s cat or perhaps his children beat out the wrong financier’s kids in soccer tryouts. Whatever it was, the film gods have been out to get him ever since. He once worked with The Wachowskis on The Matrix trilogy, Sam Raimi on the majority of his best-known works, Edgar Wright on the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and even with Robert Rodriguez on his underrated Alita: Battle Angel. In other words, he enjoyed a remarkable, even if entirely pop-leaning, prime, but the slop hasn’t stopped for for a while now. In 2023, his name was attached to the hideous Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — on second thought, maybe entering the MCU was his sinful deed — and the once-heralded cinematographer even shot Jerry Seinfeld’s unspeakable Pop-Tarts movie last year. Hopefully, the hideous-looking live action How to Train Your Dragon marks the end of Pope’s penance for Ant-Man and he can go back to making good movies.
It can’t be overstated what a truly unsightly film 2025’s How to Train Your Dragon is. The opening scene, which features the Vikings of Berk being attacked by dragons at night, is the film’s worst, appropriately setting the tone for the ugly mess to follow. Dean DeBlois, who also directed the animated film in tandem with Chris Sanders, has never worked in the realm of live action before (and thus, has never had a real night shoot). This introduction to Berk offers some of the ugliest cinematography yet seen in 2025, and it’s a shame because Pope has historically been a photographer quite capable of elevating material. But here, the deep darks fail to hide both the wounded visual effects and costuming that seems more suitable for a high school theater production than a grand-scale Hollywood blockbuster. The only upside in this sequence is found in the way its darkness establishes such strong negative space for the dragons’ fire; the black skies and photorealism introduce a more “realistic” world, with Game of Thrones-ified dragons and the attendant self-seriousness. (The only concession to the more “adult” world of this version is Toothless: he is still shiny and plush.) But this reveals a fundamental mistake: the animated film’s whimsicality was a integral part of its magic, and despite this live action version operating as an almost shot-for-shot remake, the DeBlois mistakenly forsakes the fanciful allure for a more “grounded” and mostly lank Berk.
Elsewhere, the casting direction seems to take a Las Vegas approach by seeking impersonators rather than new interpretations. Gerard Butler returns as Stoick the Vast, and he’s the best performer in the film by a sizable margin. (Butler has become something of an action film staple, but it’s never a great sign for a film’s quality when he is the best actor.) Nick Frost, meanwhile, is at least mostly tolerable as Gobber the Belch, the peg-legged blacksmith who teaches the new dragon-fighting recruits, but that’s because he plays precisely the same kind of character he always does — reliable but uninspired. The rest of the cast function mostly as charisma black holes. One has to assume Mason Thames scored the role of Hiccup because he looks just like the character, as there is little else brought to the table here. Original voice actor Jay Baruchel lent a comedic touch to his Hiccup that Thames isn’t able to match, which means that nearly all of this remake’s attempts at humor fall flat. There’s also a distinct lack of chemistry with Nico Parker’s Astrid, which is a big problem given that the elevation of her character is perhaps the film’s biggest change. And then there are the talents tasked with playing the other young dragon fighters, who largely deliver cringey and influencer-cadenced performances in service of characters have been written only as caricatures, their efforts rendered wooden and amateurish as they do their best to replicate their cartoon versions. But that this is an across-the-board problem points to larger failures of concept and direction.
Even John Powell’s score stumbles in this soulless money grab. Admittedly, the composer is stuck between a rock and a hard place with his responsibility here, as it’s difficult to imagine any alternative than basically re-mixing his work from the original… which is what he does. His 2010 score is a remarkable achievement, transcending the sphere of animated cinema and making a staking solid claim as one of the great scores of the century. The great cues are at least nearly fully preserved, though in slightly more modernized iterations: more guitar, less bagpipe, more focused melodies, and smoother mixing. Elsewhere and more frustratingly, unless the ears deceive, it seems like Powell also dials down the ethereal woodwinds on several of the best songs, an element that gifted the original score much of its pop. And while it might seem a trifling critique to lodge, to reduce the primacy of the woodwinds and almost entirely erase the use of bagpipes is a confounding choice, given that those two aural influences formed so much of the sonic backbone of the entire animated trilogy. The added choral components and the angelic respite to “Test Driving Toothless” (previously “Test Drive”) also are a clear step down from their momentous original versions, and the changes introduced to “A Romantic Flight” (previously “Romantic Flight”) nearly outright ruin a masterpiece of film composition. Only “This Is Real Berk” (previously “This Is Berk”) offers any noticeable improvement, delivering a much more aggressive sound to a scene that benefits from that intensity.
2025’s How to Train Your Dragon also ends with the same ideological faux pas as the 2010 original. “Dragons aren’t bad. They are good… Other than the big red one. He must die.” This verisimilitude draws more attention to the violence committed against Red Death and in its own way contributes to the moment of solidarity felt between the oppressed dragons and humans. But any incremental improvements of this sort offered in 2025’s (relatively) more grounded live action don’t linger long past their individual scenes. Rather, much like the action delivered in the film’s climactic fight sequence, the whole of How to Train Your Dragon drags and loses its way under a strained and failed effort to make everything bigger and bolder. — JOSHUA POLANSKI
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