Movie Thoughts: Wolf (2022)

• Released: September 15, 2022
  
• Directed by: Cees van Kempen
  
• Running time: 1 h 30 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A documentary following "Scout", a young and inexperienced dispersal wolf who is born in Germany and travels to the Netherlands as one of the first wolves to return and start a pack there after the species was wiped out 150 years ago.

My Thoughts

I've been anticipating this movie since it was first announced. Usually I don't get excited for a movie until it's close to its release date, but this one just was a concept that just worked. Wolves are a hot-button issue in the Netherlands, so making a documentary about them through a modern lens about the return of wolves to here is a great idea. Most wolf documentaries and content in general I've consumed centers around wolves in North America, so I'm always open to media about Eurasian wolves.

Wolf is a documentary following the life of Scout, a young male. He is born as a pup in a pack in Germany. We see him grow into a young-adult male, when he decides to leave his pack and disperse, looking for his own territory and mate. He finally ends up crossing into the Netherlands, and eventually ends up meeting a mate there and having pups, which he successful tries to raise into adulthood to continue on the next generation of wolves, and the first generation of wolf pups born in the Netherlands after their 150-year absence. 

The documentary overall is rather brilliant and I had a great time watching it. I loved seeing Scout's journey and while I personally didn't really learn anything new being the wolfaboo that I am, I'm sure the general public will learn a lot about wolves this way. Correct modern terms and theories are applied to the animals here. I did learn, however, about various other animals that were also briefly featured, such as badgers and certain types of mice. The wolves take central stage, but there's other critters shown as well.

Honestly, my one complaint for the film would be that at roughly the two-thirds mark it starts to lose focus a bit, with it suddenly being a lot more about the animals around the wolves rather than the wolves themselves. I'm totally fine with learning more about the animals that are a part of the same ecosystem, but since the rest of the documentary focuses so heavily on the wolves it feels a bit random to suddenly focus on a lot of other animals for ten minutes or so before returning to the wolves. If I were the filmmakers, I'd have spread out the segments about the non-wolf animals more evenly. It almost feels like a wolf-intermission in the movie. Not bad content, but just not very well-paced and spread throughout the film. 

But overall this is a great documentary. Very informative and hopefully it'll at least ease some people's worries about wolves returning to our busy tiny country. Wolves aren't cute animals to get too close to, but they're not the bloodthirsty murder-machines a lot of people seem to think they are, either. The documentary paints a realistic picture of wolves in the Netherlands and did the topic justice for sure. It's also beautifully shot and I genuinely wonder how they managed to get all this footage with how incredibly elusive wolves are (at least around here).