The Wolfpack review

For fourteen years the Angulo brothers were almost entirely confined to their family’s Manhattan apartment by their parents. Their main point of contact with the outside world was the films their father religiously collected, such as The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction. As they grew up the boys began to make their own versions of these films with themselves playing every role.

Then in January 2010, Mukunda Angulo got up one morning and simply walked out of the apartment. This act soon encouraged the others to also rebel against their parent’s strict prohibitions. It was on one of their walks around the streets of New York that the brothers met filmmaker Crystal Moselle. With their sunglasses and suits, they looked exactly like the colour nicknamed killers from Reservoir Dogs. Fascinated by them, Moselle decided to make them the subject of a film.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, The Wolfpack provides a fascinating look into the Angulo brothers’ lives and their unusual upbringing. Candid interviews with the family members are interspersed with home video footage from the brothers’ earlier years, including footage from their DIY remakes of various Hollywood movies. These films provided the brothers with vital, albeit distorted, windows into the outside world; as one of them painfully states:  ‘It makes me feel like I’m living…sort of.’

Interviews with the brothers’ mother and father are also sources of valuable insight and show how damaging decisions can be made with the best of intentions.

There are several emotional scenes, including one where the boys are about to visit a cinema for the first time. As they embrace their mother one by one before leaving the apartment, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were about to fly to the moon, rather than doing something that many people do every day. When the boys come out of the cinema having just watched The Fighter, they are visibly abuzz and it’s difficult not to smile with them, especially when one of them declares: ‘I played that guy (Christian Bale) in The Dark Knight, Batman Begins.’

If there’s one problem with the film it’s the inclusion of more obviously staged sequences. Moments such as the one where the filmmakers ‘just happen’ to walk in on Mukunda while he’s sat on his bed typing up scripts, jar with the film’s more naturalistic parts and are liable to cause some eye rolling. Luckily these are few and far between.

Ultimately if there’s any message in The Wolfpack it’s that human beings are capable of growing beyond the confines of their environment. Different things can be the catalyst for this growth. For the Angulo brothers, it was films that allowed them to reach beyond the walls they were trapped behind for so many years. Who would have thought that dressing up as Reservoir Dog’s Mr Blonde could provide both hope and a means of escape?