Wildling is a 2018 fantasy horror film about a blossoming teenager who uncovers the dark secret behind her traumatic childhood.
I like splinter horror films, meaning movies that package themselves up in all the expected go-tos of the genre and then veer off track to deliver something altogether different. Think of Robert Eggers‘ The Witch or Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook, films that appear to be standard monster in the dark tales but are much, much more. Now comes Fritz Böhm‘s promising Wildling, a clever and often very effective bit of horror that might not be quite as solid as the aforementioned titles, but is nonetheless a highly-satisfying chiller with plenty for those who want more with their scares.
We meet Anna (Bel Powley), an ingenue teenager who we discover has spent her entire childhood locked in an attic, guarded by her older than average father, appropriately called Daddy (Brad Dourif). He’s spent all those years filling the little girl’s head with tall tales of horror, ones where dangerous creatures called the ‘wildlings’ run free. This has cleanly broken an sense of reality for Anna though equally disturbing is Daddy’s daily injections for his daughter meant to delay puberty, hoping to ultimately to stop her from becoming a woman. When this naturally fails, he abandons her, having her suddenly face a world she’s entirely unfamiliar with, ending up in the care of local police officer Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler), who takes her in. She lives with her little brother, Ray (Collin Kelly-Sordelet) and the two try to help Anna as she enters school, free of the injections and before a powerful awakening begins to change everything.
Most unsettling is perhaps the start of Wildling, with the story taking on a kind of dark fairy tale where Daddy strings young Anna along with frightening yarns of monsters just at bay, keeping the child in a perpetual state of curiosity and fear. Daddy is clearly disturbed and yet his intentions are never quite understood, the ambiguity unsettling as he resorts to some distressing tactics in trying to reign in the inevitable in his daughter. Dourif creates a truly troubling character out of Daddy, especially as Anna naturally begins to mature and her body starts to take to all things female.
This is where, once Anna grows and is out of reach of her father, the film truly settles into its themes, the metaphorical implications of sexual maturity underlying everything that follows. It’s exaggerated of course and yet nuanced as Ellen struggles to be the mother to a girl whose never known such compassion and is faced with limitless discovery in boys, including Ray. This extends to school as well, where she is targeted by bullies but also exposed to an education she was long suppressed from, opening further doors for the story to connect its dots. All the while, the thought of real wildlings lingers and as she continues her transformation, flees into the woods where she finds company in The Wolfman (James Le Gros), a sort of hermit of the forest who lives well off the grid.
Wildling lives in the shadows, the film a visually dark and haunting experience that seems purposefully leading us into the unknown, the screen so dark it’s often hard to see what is happening. This isn’t as distracting as it might sound, the story one that feels most comfortable in the hollows, building to a harrowing and violent finale that has a few surprises waiting. This is a well-acted and genuinely scary film that will surely hit the spot for those craving a fresh spin on the genre.