The Wolf House (Cristóbal León and Joachín Cociña, 2018) (Patreon)

Although I am sure to see films this year that are somewhat better than The Wolf House, I will be quite surprised if I see one that is as unique. A combination of fake documentary, stop-motion animation, and time-lapse painting, The Wolf House is so replete with visual and sonic information that it can be a bit exhausting. Everything is shifting and "alive" at all times in this film, offering no respite for the viewer's consciousness. But in a lot of ways, this seems to be the point. León and Cociña are allegorizing a particular aspect of Pinochet's terror regime, and part of the intellectual work that The Wolf House seems to be performing on a formal level has to do with uncertainty and bombardment. No one knows where one stands from moment to moment.

The film proper begins after a faux-official introduction from the Chilean authorities, explaining that the film we are about to see is a recovered folk artifact from Chile's insular, German-speaking Colonia Dignidad sect. Historically, Colonia Dignidad was a right-wing religious cult who worked with Pinochet by lending the isolated colony out as a torture site for the regime. None of this is made explicit in The Wolf House, but we are made to understand that this film is a didactic tool for the colony, telling the story of a wayward young girl, Maria, who misbehaves and then retreats to a magic cabin in order to avoid punishment.

Maria enters the "wolf house" in much the same way Goldilocks wanders into the lair of the Three Bears. She searches the empty corridors, nervously looking for signs of life. What she finds, eventually, are two abandoned pigs. She names them Ana and Pedro, and uses a series of enchantments to turn them into Golem-like human beings. She works to protect them from the Wolf, but eventually the three of them get hungry and the pig-people turn on Maria, planning to eat her. The leaders of Colonia Dignidad, who Maria was trying to escape in the first place, come to her rescue, and she is summarily returned to the fold.

Wolf House is a remarkable combination of 2D animation and 3D papier mâché sculpture, with bodies and objects whirling around the house in a state of constant flux. Frequently, Maria and the pig-children will be partially painted on the wall, with torsos and limbs jutting out into space. Faces and patterns move laterally across the walls with a wiping motion that indicates the use of oil paint for much of the imagery. Sometimes Maria will "dissolve" into a series of pink and white tones. 

The film is clearly indebted to a particular history of alternative animation. An attentive viewer will quickly detect the prominent influence of Jan Svankmajer, with notes of Priit Pärn and Janie Geiser. But the overall method of "moving" images by painting them, wiping them away, and then repainting them with slight variations, seems directly inspired by the animated drawings of South African artist William Kentridge. (The images themselves are somewhat varied in their abstraction, resembling the work of such diverse painters as Julien Schnabel, Philip Guston, Francesco Clemente, and Forrest Bess.) 

Despite the fact that The Wolf House is quite obviously the heir of a long tradition, it really does have the mood and feel of outsider art, something that could have truly emerged from a warped little pocket of the world. After all, it depicts the unbridled glory of the imagination -- a kind of Rumspringa of the mind -- as the childish prelude to a life of total obedience.