Image courtesy of Focus Features
The horrors of assimilation are becoming more and more prominent in entertainment to the point where ‘assimilation horror’ should be considered a new subgenre. Forced assimilation into a dominant culture has been around for centuries and can be found in any corner of the globe, like when imperialist countries ‘convert’ India, Hawaii, Australia, Canada, and so much of Africa.
There’s no shortage of literature on this, too, including Karen Russell’s short story ‘St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves.’ In it, girls and boys in the wild are stolen away from parents who suffer from lycanthropy. These children are then forced into residential homes separated by sex and ruled by nuns and priests. They are forced to ‘humanize’, stop spraying their bedrooms, take human names (instead of their guttural sounds that function as names), and even learn enough manners and etiquette to participate in a school-sponsored dance. The story is a disturbing allegory for what indigenous peoples have suffered through during the last century at residential schools.
Wolf (2021) updates this assimilation horror by replacing the nuns, priests, and residential home with psychologists and a treatment center. Our protagonist, Jacob (George MacKay), is seen in the opening scene stalking through the woods naked and on all fours, rolling in the dirt and leaves, and howling at the trees. We next see him being dropped off at the treatment center by his parents. A brief conversation occurs between them about Jacob ‘getting better’.
Anyone familiar with conversion therapy will find Jacob’s time at the center torturous and all-too-familiar. While electrodes and physical abuse aren’t used there (like in the well-intentioned They/Them), psychological abuse and gaslighting are used on Jacob and the other patients, who all identify as various kinds of animals.
Parrot (Lola Petticrew)’s response to the therapy is the most immature and entertaining, though the head psychologist,simply called ‘The Zookeeper’ (played by the effectively creepy and intense Paddy Considine), forces her to be held on a second-story window ledge so that she can ‘fly’. Other animals are goaded by the Zookeeper to try actions that they should be able to do if they were really that animal.
The allegory is obvious in these abusive therapy scenes and in the beautiful art direction used in depicting the treatment center. Various posters are seen on the walls that should help the patients in their therapy, including an oft-seen poster that simply reads, ‘species dysphoria’. German Shepherd (Finn O’Shea from Handsome Devil) graduates from the program, only to be brought lead back to the center on a leash two weeks later.
Leashes are just one of the few ways that this story allegorizes the varieties of sexual orientations. Dominance and submission are prevalent in so many scenes, especially in a frightfully animalistic courtship between Jacob and Wildcat (Lily-Rose Depp). This scene could come off as ridiculous, but MacKay’s masterful physical performance sells it.
If the viewer can’t sit still in many of these abusive scenes, then this movie has done its job. This is a masterful Irish film that updates the assimilation horror genre by turning it’s lens onto conversion therapy.
Wolf is currently streaming on HBO or Cinemax.
- EB