Dad is a freak. No, I think that’s fair. Say, you’re a dad, right? Did you lock your family in your apartment … forever? [If you did, you can probably stop reading now] The Angulo family, a real live honest-to-God family, lives in a two (?) three (?) bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; its residents include a father, a mother, a girl and six teenage boys. Only the father goes outside the apartment. Ever.
You think I’m kidding, don’t you?
Dad has the only key to an apartment that locks from the outside. And all day, his wife and home-schooled kids play dress-up and “Reservoir Dogs.” Again and again and again. And now the kids are kinda … old. They’re also decidedly out-of-touch and mildly creepy. The six boys are relatively interchangeable – all vampire pale with vaguely Incan features, bad teen moustaches and waist-length black hair that would fetch a pretty penny in any salon off MLK, Jr. Avenue.
Imagine Rapunzel – locked in her tower forever and a day, nothin’ to do but comb her hair and play checkers with her imaginary friend. Now imagine that instead of one Rapunzel girl, you replace her with six creepy Incan boys who while the hours away designing Batsuits out of cereal boxes and transcribing screenplays to Quentin Tarantino films.
What do you suppose it’s like to grow up in prison?
I was initially disappointed to realize The Wolfpack was a documentary. It’s one thing to make a film about kids who make bad films; it’s another entirely when those kids aren’t fictional. It means there isn’t a stylistic reason to include a modicum of poorly interpreted art; this is who they are. As the narrative continues, however, this film sucks you into the abyss of abuse. Seriously, these kids never go outside. They aren’t allowed to. Seriously, these nine folks share, maybe, 800 sq.ft. And I think that’s generous. Seriously, the only way they relate to the world is by watching movies. [I attend, literally, hundreds of films in a theater each year and even I find that creepy.]
At one point, the boys are allowed to attend The Fighter at a theater a few blocks from their house. One can see how excited they are; none of them has ever been to a movie theater; who knows if the group made it outside this year? I’m no psychologist, but it doesn’t take one to see there will be issues, and many of them, in the years ahead.
Oh, did I mention, dad doesn’t work? Yeah. Making a bad name for every freedom fighter, dad decided that working is giving in to THE MAN. What does the family live on? Well, mom – who gets to call her own estranged mother late in the film (“yeah, mom, I have seven kids” — think
of what goes into that statement alone) – earns a small teaching stipend for the home schooling. In fact, there’s a good chance that had one of the kids not escaped a year ago and gone wandering around the neighborhood shops in a Mike Myers mask, this could still be going on.
So, are there more cases of this kind of growing-up-as-a-shut-in all over the city, the state, the country? There must be, right? The more I think about The Wolfpack, the more unsettling it feels. Kudos; that’s not an emotion that gets to the screen very often.
At society, daddy was sore-a
So he laid down strict local authora
Unleashed on the world
Kids lives unfurled
Which was worse, the box or Pandora?
Rated R, 80 Minutes
D: Crystal Moselle
W: Whomever takes dictation in Hell
Genre: Freakology
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Sociologists
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who home school
