Review of The Wolfpack (2015) by Matt H — 18 Nov 2015

This is a very polarizing documentary, it contains five star quality story material with two star documentary directing and actual storytelling. The director, Crystal Moselle, has created an intriguing and yet perplexing doc.

As a documentarian, I feel she fails at an alarming rate. There's so many questions that go unanswered (or addressed at all). From doing addition research, it appears not all of the facts were mentioned either.

There's a major question of how much of what the doc says is real. Now, all of these problems may not be the director's fault at all, Moselle might have had to agree to not mention or address these issues due to some of the participants of the doc.

For example, never seeing the reunion of the boy's mother's parents might have been due to either the mom or her parents wishes to not film something so potentially private, which is understandable.

But in not paying that off, it makes you wonder why the director added the phone conversation in the first place. There's many instances like this in the doc that are problematic. If the director wasn't hampered by the participants, then I'm at a loss as to why she left so much out and left with so many unanswered questions? Did she get too close to her subjects and didn't want to press them? Who can know for sure.

Now, finally, to the actual story that the doc presents - those poor children. You can literally see the psychological damage in their eyes in some scenes that their (mentally ill) father inflicted on them.

I'm glad that judging from the DVD extras they seem to be adjusting pretty well overall. As a fellow obsessed movie lover, it's funny how much I can identify with the brothers and how much of myself I see in them, to almost saying 15 years of doing nothing but watching movies sounds kind of great (obviously not), and basically I've done that myself anyway.

It's also a little too close to home in that movies and talking about are mostly my only means of socializing with other people (not to the same extent, but still).