A Lone Wolf

George MacKay is great in Wolf. There are these moments when he stalks down the hallway and he completely looks like he should be a wolf. But Nathalie Biancheri's film never manages to give us the real weirdness of the Yorgos Lanthimos films on which Wolf has obviously modeled itself. This is a movie that wants to be about what it means to be human – a good human, a good man, etc. – but it's a film that instead opts for what appears to be an allegory for transgender. And I'm just not sure what Wolf has to say about transgender – or that it should be taking up space making up allegories for how people experience gender. 

This just didn't work. It's opening sequences feel like Lanthimos territory, and in their way these early moments in the movie prompt laughter just as the scenes in The Lobster do. But then the film refuses to go off the deep end the way a Lanthimos movie would. It settles instead for the world we already know. Wolf leaves us with liberal platitudes with which we are comfortable and familiar instead of any real unsettling questions.