FilmSnobReviews

Title: Wildling
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Fritz Böhm
Starring: Liv Tyler, Bel Powley, Brad Dourif
Runtime: 1 hr 32 mins

What It Is: When Anna (Powley) was a baby she was kept in her room by her “Daddy” (Dourif) when she begins to approach womanhood “Daddy” begins to give her shots in her stomach that pause her menstruation. When “Daddy” tries to blow his head off with a shotgun the cops discover what he’s done and Anna is now set free in a world she doesn’t know anything about. When she’s befriended by a Sheriffs Deputy named Ellen Cooper (Tyler) things get really weird.

What We Think: There’s a lot to like here. Bel Powley continues to be just so fantastic. From my first experience with her in The Diary of a Teenage Girl in that she has a certain charm. One evident here as well. There’s a necessary wildness to the way she brings Anna to life. Liv Tyler feels refreshed here and it was nice to see her doing something less glamorous and allowing her to actually act a bit. Most of the makeup and hair looks great and that’s important to a story like this. Something where lesser effects could take you out of the film for sure.

Our Grade: C+, Insofar as horror films go this one isn’t near the worse. It also can’t touch the best of this genre. Equal parts The Howling and Teen Wolf it’s not nearly as good as either of this but certainly, put what these films try to do together with a splash of new wave filmmaking and that’s what you get here. At the end of the day, I can only give this a slight recommendation. It is nonetheless a decent film and one that fans of the werewolf genre will appreciate.