By Keri O’Shea
It is of course a huge cliché to begin this review of Big Bad Wolves by professing my ignorance of Israeli cinema – but such it is, and if it’s going to be repeated elsewhere, it’s no doubt just as true from other quarters. Israel and film just feels beyond Western reach in so many ways; our concepts of the country tend to come more via current affairs – often bad news – than through contact with what could well be a thriving arts culture, but so little permeates through to us that, well, Israel still feels like a closed book in this respect. So, Big Bad Wolves is the first Israeli feature-length film I have ever seen, and as such it would be ridiculous to extrapolate too much about filmmaking in the country as a whole. However, I will gladly say that this is one of the finest, darkest crime thrillers I have had the pleasure to watch, and that if – if – the directors and writers Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado are capable of more work of this calibre, then they will definitely and deservedly be on the ascendant from here on in.
The plot starts as it means to go on, splicing the everyday in with the briefest, but significant interludes which spell personal disaster for everyday people. We see a group of children playing hide and seek in and around a deserted house; a little boy finds one of his friends but when they go back to where the other girl was hiding, she’s no longer there. This leads to a hunt for the girl, undertaken by what at first seems like a criminal fraternity but turns out to be the cops, led by the charismatic, but flawed Micki (Lior Ashkenazi). Their investigation has brought them to a diminutive local figure, a teacher named Dror (Rotem Keinan): we are not told why he’s in the frame, or if there’s any good reason for it whatsoever, but the first major error in a catalogue of them is that, as they rough him up for good measure in a disused warehouse, their actions are filmed by a kid using his mobile phone. This puts a downer on Micki’s relationship with his boss, especially when the clip hits the equivalent of Youtube, but more to the point when the missing girl is found – dead – in a grotesquely-staged tableau, Micki is partly blamed, and then moved to a new department.
But Micki – with the implicit knowledge of his boss, it seems – retains an interest in catching this child killer, and just cannot let the case be. Likewise, someone else seems to be interested in what he is doing, unbeknownst, for the moment, to him. As those with a vested interest in trapping the predator collide, all are drawn into a savage, claustrophobic situation in which the most noble human impulses hold hands with unmitigated savagery – albeit framed by the most mundane details, as normal life just goes on around them, for as long as it feasibly can.
Wow. The first thing I’d say about this film is how brave I think it is to tackle an emotive subject like child abduction and murder head-on: it takes some doing to carve an engrossing narrative out of a subject which, in modern times, can quite simply provoke hysteria, especially when that narrative refuses to shy away from the grisly details – without, though, ever sinking to using these simply for shock, or to exploit the potential for emotional response. Of course, the subjects raised can make for unsettling viewing; that’s a given. Yet, another aspect of the film which prevents the type of crime underpinning the plot from ever feeling wanton is simply that we are kept in the dark. We are no omniscient audience – hell, we don’t even get to know what the cops know. Why is Dror in the frame? Should he be? Do they have the wrong guy – could this all be a horrible mistake? Because of the several strands of ambiguity which are woven through the film, we are made to feel even more uncomfortable – made to witness horrific acts undertaken by desperate men, though never made to feel we are being traipsed into a ‘torture porn’ scenario (despite the film opting for a much-hated torture porn trope of mine). Throughout, I had no idea who to believe or where my loyalties should lie. Once I felt I knew, the film would perform an about-face and make me reconsider. No one acts as expected, right down to the Arab character who gets a small role here, seemingly just to thwart everyone’s expectations of him. It’s testament to the superb writing at the heart of this film that it can challenge the audience like this, indeed several times as it moves forward.
Another facet to the skill of the writing stems from an aspect which, in itself, could be seen as a challenge: this film is fucking funny. Never for too long, and never where you expect it to be, but funny nonetheless. Sometimes the humour is sliced so thinly in amongst the film’s action scenes that you barely have time to give yourself permission to laugh. Sometimes, it’s more overt – and often challenging in its own ways by referencing childhood in places you would not expect: crime details read out as a ‘Once Upon a Time’ story; coins tossed to decide who commits an act of cruelty; wry exchanges between people in the throes of these acts. One of the film’s key themes seems to be surveillance – people seeing what they shouldn’t, or even going where they shouldn’t, and yet, this hefty topic is also made funny in places, like the Youtube plot-line. In effect, often you’ll laugh when you’d really rather not – though never losing sight of the main drive behind the narrative. The nuanced, developed characters at work here are, through the way in which they can make a joke out of the worst situation, or approach it in such a way, all the more human-seeming for it. We’re made to see that even at their worst, people are still people – a cold, hard fact, which often makes us more uncomfortable than the possibility of monsters.
A surpassingly bleak piece of cinema, Big Bad Wolves has both initiative and guts, holding onto its final shock until right at the end. It also has the courage to dodge out of any smooth resolution, landing us with a jagged, weighty ending after everything else. Big Bad Wolves kept me guessing until the final reel. On occasion, I am arrogant enough to suppose I’ve seen so many films that nothing can surprise me, but sometimes, it’s great to be wrong. I’m excited to see what these guys can come up with for their segment in the upcoming ABCs of Death 2…
Big Bad Wolves will be released on 28th April 2014.