The Wolf House

MOVIE #1,080 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.26.23 Trying too hard to parse meaning out of this, especially in any given moment, feels like blood from a stone and what have you. There’s certainly a deep meaning and metaphor but it’s in service of the art and not the other way around. This feels unique in and of itself. And it only works because the art — by the duo Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña, who recently animated the trippy sequence in Beau is Afraid — is astonishing: a raw and sprawling work that seems to live in an eternal, evergrowing loop…in just 73 minutes! (The style definitely reminded me of the pseudonymous Italian artist BLU.)

Tying it to such udder (and specific) madness, the darkest humanity has to offer — the sordid saga of isolated Chilean colony, Colonia Dignidad — is a bold choice. Because the movie can and does work outside of any of that contextual backdrop. Of course it does. But it never feels like a trick or overly forced, like: that thing’s over there if you want to meddle with it. Otherwise: young lady and her pig children. Go! Escape. And maybe that was the point all along.

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The Wolf House (Spanish: La casa lobo) is a 2018 Chilean adult stop motion animated art film directed by Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña (in their directorial debuts) and co-written with Alejandra Moffat. Inspired by the actual case of Colonia Dignidad, The Wolf House masquerades as an animated fairy tale produced by the leader of the sect in order to indoctrinate its followers. The film uses elements of avant-garde cinema, dark fantasy, adult animation, psychological drama, surrealism, and supernatural horror. It had its world premiere at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival. It was released on February 22, 2018.