Movie Thoughts: Vicky and her Mystery (2021)

• Released: October 23rd, 2021
  
• Directed by: Denis Imbert
• Running time: 1h 24min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A girl named Victoria moves to a new village with her father and adopts a puppy, whom she names Mystery. Time passes and it turns out that Mystery is actually a gray wolf, not a dog like Victoria's father initially thought. With the farmers of the village being increasingly hostile towards wolves, Victoria and her father will now have get Mystery to safety in the wild, all the while Victoria doesn't want to give up her pet.

My Thoughts

You know me and my wolf movies. I gotta watch them if I can. I literally subscribed to a new streaming service just to be able to watch this one.

And it's...yeah, okay, not very good. It's decent, I guess. Inoffensive and bland would best describe this, I guess. If you've seen any other "kid with dog" or "kid with wild animal as pet" movie, you've basically seen this one as well. It uses a lot of familiar tropes present in such movies and doesn't do anything new with them, really.

What I did like is that this movie used real wolves, even if I'm not sure if it was responsible to have them interacting with this eight-year-old girl. No CGI or green-screening (as far as I can tell) was used here, which I think they maybe should've done for some of the direct human-wolf interactions for both the safety and peace of animal and human actor. But oh well, it is what it is.

I do like the moral of this movie that wolves don't make great pets and belong in the wild, as I've seen quite a few "kid with wild animal as pet" movies where they have the kid keep the animal as a pet in the end. But at the same time, the fact that Mystery is so easily released into the wild doesn't feel all that realistic. Mystery was raised as a pet (basically like a dog) from when he was a pup and he's about half-grown when he's suddenly tossed into the wild in a reserve with a strange pack of wolves. 

In the movie, of course Mystery learns to survive and joins the pack of wolves. But in reality we all know that this wouldn't happen like that. Mystery would need a lot of training to be able to survive in the wild. And you can't just put a new wolf with a pre-established pack and expect it to be accepted as one of them. In most cases, this wouldn't happen at all. So I feel that the movie kinda just glossed over the whole "rewilding Mystery" aspect and wish it paid a little more attention to it. Show us how Mystery manages to adapt to life in the wild. Show us how he becomes a fully accepted member of the pack. It's right now mostly just glossed over.

The acting (at least of the Dutch dub) was okay and from what I can tell the kid portraying Vicky did a decent enough job as well. The wolf actors were solid too.

The characters were just kind of very basic. Again, just very bland and basic and trope-y. I didn't hate any of them, but neither did I really feel a connection with any of them. Even Mystery just kind of feels like "the pet" and has no real personality or much to him. He's just any basic wolf character you can imagine in these types of movies.

The movie also didn't really have any interesting shots or anything that really made it stand out. So visually it was, again, pretty bland.

It's just a kind-of mediocre movie. Not the worst, not the best. If you like wolves I guess I recommend this but outside of that there's not much to it.