The film implies that watching – and imitating

If all it took to make a great documentary was a great subject, then The Wolfpack would certainly qualify. It’s about the Angulos, a family of six brothers (and one sister, though we barely see her) who have grown up in a cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and have spent nearly every moment of their lives inside its claustrophobic confines. They are home-schooled, with no computer and no friends other than each other, and they are almost never allowed to leave the apartment. Yet to say that they have no contact with the outside world would be inaccurate: they watch movies – hundreds of them, over and over – and when they act out scenes from Tarantino or Scorsese or David Lynch, in primitively ingenious costumes fashioned out of cereal boxes and yoga mats they’re at once spooky and touching. The film implies that watching – and imitating – these films is their lifeline. Even more than the scrappy classic-movie parodies in Me and Earl, The Wolfpack speaks to a generation that has learned to filter every moment of its experience through pop culture. No wonder the film ruled at Sundance.

The Angulo sons all have long, straight black hair, prominent cheekbones and friendly grins that make each of them look like a different answer to the question: what if Johnny Depp and Jeff Goldblum had a baby? There’s a disarming sweetness to them, and that’s partly because they’ve managed to hold on to their individuality within a family that comes off like an oppressive cult. The father is described by his sons as a tyrant, but mostly we see him sitting around watching TV, and how he raised them remains a murky mystery. We have no idea where he got his money, whether he was – as one son claims – a violent abuser, or why, after all these years of treating his children like prisoners, he has suddenly agreed to let film-maker Crystal Moselle into his home. In the last part of the film, the kids are allowed out, seemingly at will, and that raises a further question: can we regard it as a simple coincidence that the father chose this moment, surrounded by cameras, to allow his sons into the great wide world?