Review of The Wolfpack (2015) by Manny C — 11 Jul 2015

Suppose your parents kept you and your siblings locked up in a public housing project in Manhattan and the only thing you knew of the outside world came from Hollywood movies? It's a bit of a loaded question---and it's one that filmmaker Crystal Moselle runs with in this terrific documentary. She far from answers all of the questions raised in her film, sometimes to its detriment, but there's no looking away from it.

It was the tenets of the Hare Krishna faith that led Peruvian-born musician Oscar Angulo and his American wife Suzanne to shield their six sons and one daughter away from the crime-ridden streets of the Lower East Side. With the exception of a few rare, chaperoned excursions outside their door, these highly impressionable kids, ages 16 to 24 when we first meet them, spend much of their time devouring Hollywood movies. They're a cinematic wolfpack. From the works of Quentin Tarantino to Goodfellas, Halloween, The Dark Knight, just about any movie becomes a show that these kids can turn into plays and reenact for the family. Despite revelations of abuse on the part of dad, the children, homeschooled by their mother, are staggeringly normal and full of charm.

Without giving away too much, it's fair to say that there's is eventually a breakthrough. It's how Moselle met the Angulos and won access to their home movies. The Wolfpack becomes frustrating in how much it doesn't say about the family and the legal implications of their release, but once you meet these kids, there's no forgetting them. It's hypnotic and unmissable.