Movie Review: The Wildling

So my bad-horror-movie-to-watch-while-folding-laundry last week was The Wildling. I went in expecting, like, a psychological drama, a lot of tense conversations and pregnant silences and such-like. It, uh, it um... well, boy it was something, I guess.

Opens with twenty minutes of extended abusive parenting, then segues abruptly into Twilight by way of Ginger Snaps. There are some wild scene and timeframe changes, not to mention a tone that veers between the aforementioned highly detailed abuse scene(s) and some Encino Man fish-out-of-water jokey segments. Honestly, with how extreme the scene jumps are and how much goes unspoken between them while excessive time is spent on completely unnecessary bits, I assumed that this thing was based on some YA novel that they were trying to remain faithful to, but according to my spouse's research, it's original to film. I could go on for hundreds of words listing all the weird inconsistencies and bonkers narrative choices, not the least of which is the central premise of sending a teenage girl with medically-induced developmental disabilities to live unsupervised with a non-expert who has a busy job that leaves said girl alone constantly with a horny "teenage" boy. (The actor is visibly nearing thirty, but he is apparently supposed to be still in high school.) And then the backwoods werewolf hunters who also have a national network, the wolf shaman who just kind of lives in town except when he's setting lethal mantraps in random locations in the woods, the unexplored implications of werewolf DNA now being in national medical and criminal databases... Anyway.

Everyone involved is trying very hard, but I can't recommend this movie unless you just really super duper love werewolf movies and want to see all of them or if you enjoy (as I do) watching the slow-motion trainwreck of people with lofty goals and big ideas grinding agonizingly against the limitations of the medium and the budget.