Wilkolak | 2018 | Poland/Netherlands/Germany | Directed by Adrian Panek
Logline: A group of young and older children are liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, but find themselves trapped in an abandoned mansion besieged by vicious dogs.
The horror of war is nothing to sneeze at, and in writer/director Panek’s portrait of ravaged innocence and ruined humanity the Holocaust is merely the backdrop to another animals-with-bloodlust terror, in this case, ravenous dogs. From the appalling behaviour of humans to the appalling behaviour instilled in man’s best friend, Werewolf is a hybrid horror-thriller-drama about trust and betrayal, survival of the fittest.
It is the end of WWII, and in the concentration camp known as Gross Rosen a group of eight children, aged from around five to late teens, are liberated and seek shelter with an adult, Jadwiga (Danuta Stenka), in a derelict, abandoned mansion within a nearby forest. They are starving and have little to no food. Quickly they resort to desperate measures. The two eldest, Hanka (Sonia Mietielica) and “Kraut” (Nicolas Przygoda), do their best to facilitate and supervise whatever they can get their hands on, like a single can of dogwood and a bunch of potatoes. Some of the children are so young, they were born into captivity and have never used cutlery before.
Wladek (Kamil Polnisiak) is the wild card. He’s obviously more traumatised than the others, from all the horrors he’s witnessed. He feels threatened by Kraut, especially as he is fond of Hanka, and knows she is out of reach. He contemplates dangerous, murderous action. But there is more immediate deadly danger; as a pack of freed SS guard dogs have sniffed their way to the property, and the smell of human is making them salivate. Now the kids have to really keep their wits about them, as the dogs attempt to infiltrate the house.
Werewolf is a gripping and powerful film, beautifully shot by Dominik Danilczyk and expertly cut by Jaroslaw Kaminski. The use of tension and suspense is handled with great skill, and the geography of the wilderness location is both majestic and claustrophobic. The performances are all excellent, especially Mietielica, she’s one to watch, but also Polnisiak, both exhibit a mature understanding of subtlety and nuances it’s so often all in the eyes. Also of note is Werner Daehn as an SS officer from the camp who is holed up in a bunker not far from the mansion.
I’m reminded of two other war-related films set in the countryside, the first, Lore, directed by Australian Cate Shortland, with focus on the plight of a young woman dealing with the immediate horrors and terrorisation in WWII Germany, and the other, Burnt by the Sun, directed by a Russian, Nikita Mikhalkov, with focus on the plight of a revolution hero who is suspected of being a spy. In both of these the directors capture moments of exquisite, ethereal beauty amidst the horror. One such moment in Werewolf has Hanka alone, finding a forgotten suitcase full of a woman’s finery, including a pretty red dress, which she adorns, and applies lipstick, admiring her sensuous reflection, then slumbers peacefully on the balcony chaise-lounge in the soft afternoon sunlight.
Werewolf (the title references the planned Nazi “werwolf” resistance force to operate in Allied-occupied Germany) plays with a very familiar scenario, the hapless trapped by marauding beasts, but gives it a much more humanistic edge, and an altogether more vulnerable one. The term out of the frying pan and into the fire comes to mind, but whose snap will do the most damage, the trained killer dogs, the psychologically damaged young boy, or something else?
One of the year’s best.