Presented as an old film restored by the Chilean directors/animators Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León about a German colony with a very bad reputation, The Wolf House is a disarming excavation of proto-fascist tropes served up as surreal art. Based on the story of Colonia Dignidad, a real colony founded by a Nazi child molester that purported to achieve earthly happiness through the imposition of an iron fist (reportedly, the colony aided Pinochet in the persecution of his enemies), the movie, after a brief, almost comical précis about its own provenance, proceeds to tell the animated tale of Maria, a member of the colony who is punished for allowing three pigs in her care to escape, and who herself escapes confinement to the titular structure, which she finds abandoned in the woods as she flees what she believes is a wolf that means to devour her.

Cociñã and León shift between crude 2D animation painted on the walls of the house and 3D stop-motion animation using equally crude but nevertheless lifelike papier-mâché constructions, with the former morphing into the latter and vice versa. Most of the action takes place within Maria’s fevered mind, as she tries to keep the wolf at bay and protect her “children,” two pigs that shift into human form at Maria’s will. The house itself is depicted as a living thing, something that “promises to protect” Maria and her children while also occasionally betraying what trust the girl has invested in the place. Continually haunted by the voice of the invisible wolf, in both German and Spanish, she comes to accept the guilt of her betrayal of the colony and, in a sense, adopts its mindset in her approach to the children in her care. “Do you want to be something better?” she chides them in the tone of someone who is trying to put them in their places, and then forbidding them to leave, even after they’ve been maimed in a fire. Eventually, their own hunger sets them against Maria, who thus comes to empathize with the wolf. When she “feeds” some small animals to a tree, she feels a sense of accomplishment.

Cociñã and León’s style is grotesque and unsettling, but the development of The Wolf House makes good on its self-proclaimed purpose as a propaganda film to sell the virtues of the colony, and, of course, the effect on the viewer is the opposite. The overriding emotional parameters are fear and loathing, which are often inverted back on Maria as she loses her purchase on not just her common sense, but whatever moral foundation she may have once clung to. The need for sustenance and spiritual succor warps her perspective, a concept the filmmakers recreate with stunning imaginative assurance. It’s difficult to describe exactly what they pull off, since the visuals are in such a constant state of flux—mainly from integration to decay—that the viewer can’t keep track of where one image ends and another begins, even while it is happening. The production notes say the pair spent almost four years making this 75-minute film, which sounds too short to me. The Wolf House contains a lifetime’s worth of disturbing ideas. 

In Spanish and German. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

The Wolf House home page in Japanese

photo (c) Diluvio & Globo Rojo Films 2018