Butler's Cinema Scene

Bel Powley

“WILDING” My rating: C 

92 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Before it bogs down in overcooked horror film cheese, Fritz Bohm’s “The Wildling” pulls a clever narrative con job on its audience.

It’s one of those cases where you’re pretty sure of what the movie’s about until you realize you have it all wrong.

In a prequel Daddy (Brad Dourif) tends to his precious little girl, Anna. Except that there’s something odd going on here…Anna is never allowed to leave  her room and Daddy fills her with tales of the evil Wildling that lives in the woods outside their home and would like nothing better than to snatch and eat such a delightful child.

So, yeah, the kid grows up weird.  When Anna hits puberty Daddy starts giving her daily injections apparently meant to retard menstruation and other signs of maturation.

And then one day Daddy puts a gun to his head and BLAM. It’s pretty clear that he snatched Anna as a young girl and raised her in secret. Now he’s overcome by regret.

Discovered by neighbors who heard the shot, young Anna — now a young woman played by Bel Powley — is rescued by the authorities. The local chief of police, Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler), takes the mysterious and befuddled girl (she’s never been outside her bedroom) into her own home with the intention of filing for full custody.

The sheriff’s  younger brother, Lawrence (Mike Faist), lives with them and befriends Anna, attempting  to guide her through the minefield of high school.

So the screenplay by Bohm and Florian Elder is all about this innocent learning to cope with real-world conflicts after a sheltered childhood, right?

Liv Tyler

Un, NO.  Little by little the film reveals that Anna is no regular person, that she contains a genetic (or is it supernatural?) proclivity for animalistic behavior.  Now we must look at her childhood as Daddy’s captive in an entirely new light.

At this point shit just gets silly.  There’s a fantastic old coot (James Le Gros) with a Grizzly Adams beard and bearskin skivvies who lives in the woods and seems to know something of Anna’s pre-captivity life.

Even more eyebrow raising is Daddy’s  miraculous recovery from that self-inflicted head shot (WTF!?!?!?). Now in full possession of his physical and mental capacities, he begins stalking his little girl, determined to finish the job he has been delaying all these years.

The players are competent enough, but by film’s end they’re required to juggle so many narrative implausibilities that the whole enterprise capsizes.

| Robert W. Butler