Feral is a 2019 drama about a homeless woman living in the tunnels below New York City who survives on her own terms in the days leading up to a blizzard.
For most, there is a kind of planned hesitancy in our footfalls forward, with time, energy, shelter, and income able to make even the most significant decisions seem less so. However, there are too many on the streets where every decision must be immediate, every action so weighted it’s life or death day to day. Sometimes hour to hour.
It’s here where director Andrew Wonder puts us in his latest film Feral, a brief but harrowing examination of a young woman trapped in this struggle, positioned to be an example of those who to the outside world have turned invisible. It’s a deeply personal film, mostly orbiting close around the plights of one while occasionally letting others like her have their voice, slowly un-spooling her troubling story as she braces for a storm that could change it all.
It begins with a figure rummaging in the deep shadows of the city’s dead ends. She is Yazmine (Annapurna Sriram), living nestled in a subway catacomb desperately alone and on her own. She emerges from her hollow with a singular mission, take what she can from whomever she can however she can to stay alive. She dons herself in wigs and colors to shield her truth from those she targets. She’s not a predator in the conventional sense, but a victim burrowed into the recesses of the system that left her motherless and with no place to go. Forced to fend for herself, she’s become entangled in the darkness of living like she does. Feral.
Sriram is on screen for nearly the entire run-time, introduced digging through the discarded by the underground tracks of the city’s subway and we instantly understand where and what she is, even if the why is left unsaid for a time. In truth, that doesn’t really matter, like everything for Yazmine, these moments are urgent, looking for anything that can help to sustain her, from scraps of food to trickets and clothes that let her feel some sort of humanity. Wonder keeps his camera close to her, often right behind her shoulder, keeping her world view very small, direct, bleak, and bordered by the reach of her hand, the only thing she has control over.
We do learn what put her on the streets and while she deals with that pain, needs only to get through the day. It’s not easy of course, nor is it for us to watch, Sriram consumed by Yazmine’s choices and fate. It’s a starkly terrifying performance with Sriram not once sensationalizing or overworking the momentum of Yazmine’s story. Nor does Wonder, who is careful not to fall into the numerous potholes of the genre that could have left this feeling contrived or emotionally manipulative.
There is some hope tucked under Feral, the film tracking Yazmine through a series of opportunities where both organizations and kind citizens offer what they can. But this is a porous world where very little holds what it should. Thus Yazmine is left always unsure, always untrustful, always on her own. We are too by it ends, drifting like this young woman, considering to ourselves what we would do and more so, what can we do. It’s a quietly haunting nightmare for us. A worse reality for those she represents.
Feral premiered and was screened for the Sarasota Film Festival.