Wildling, aka Teen Mom of the Wild
It’s worth volunteering up front that I’m pretty tired of women’s coming-of-age stories revolving around getting a period and then suddenly bursting with sexual energy.
Girls in my fourth grade class were getting their periods. Lots of us didn’t lose our virginities until our twenties and believe me, it wasn’t a big deal. Leaning on this “what’s happening to my body” (looking at you, Spiderman, with all your sticky white fluids and sudden musculature, ahem) trope as a plot device is pretty boring.
Wildling falls into this trap without doing much else interesting to comment on a girl’s coming of age experience. Oh, except that she turns into a were-creature. Because it’s a metaphor? For like…nature? Or…women?
Let’s chat.
Official Synopsis:
Anna spends her entire childhood under the care of a mysterious man she only knows as Daddy. He keeps her locked in an attic making her fear the Wildling, a child-eating monster that roams the outside. At age 16, Anna is freed by small-town sheriff Ellen Cooper who helps her start a new life as a normal teenager.
Short: A blossoming teenager uncovers the dark secret behind her traumatic childhood.
The Metaphor:
There are two options for what the main metaphor of this movie could be:
A: Puberty (for a Woman)
B: Nature vs Nurture (or all Mankind)
Wildling doesn’t elevate itself with either beauty or gore or depth in this horror/drama. As much as I despise the “your period makes you a W O M A N” trope, it’s pretty lame that coming of age stories for women (and by extension, what ‘makes’ a woman) boils down to: period, sex, pregnancy.
Spoilers abound, by the way, if you haven’t seen this 2018 piece yet.
Pregnancy and motherhood are very different. “Mother” is a role that is played. It’s something defined by society. Pregnancy is the physical part of procreation. Equating the two is like equating sex and adulthood. Which this film also seems to do.
I mean, let’s back up.
Look at that one-line synopsis. Look at it. It says blossoming. I think I threw up in my mouth a little. Anna, who we see grow from an adorable toddler, is sixteen. And the movie ends with her having sex in the woods and getting pregnant and running off to be with her own kind. As if it’s some wild magic.
Even roaches have babies.
I wouldn’t be so bothered by the sudden “motherhood” angle if the movie didn’t push it near the final, brutal, conflict in the movie as Anna’s sole reason to survive. There’s a point where she’s being overcome by smoke, but touches her belly and, as if inspired by the thing growing inside of her, gathers her energy and decides “I’m not dying today” because…motherhood?
Wild animals don’t…do that. They just survive. If the framing of the movie had been different - if it had been about motherhood, or centered on a pregnant woman-creature who is doing everything she can to survive to preserve her pregnancy - then, sure. She’d have that motivation as part of her character. I’d know that going in. But thrusting this motivation on Anna just seems…lame.
Oh, and let’s briefly discuss Anna’s, um, “Daddy issues”. I mean, yeah - every girl that’s gotten pregnant at sixteen by fucking a boy in the woods one time has Daddy issues, right?
Just. Ugh.
Okay, Daddy is played by Brad Dourif who I’m just going to call Chucky. Chucky, who has imprisoned Anna since she was an infant, prevented Anna from getting her period by shooting her up with Endometriosis injections. She got sick, he got guilty, and shot himself rather than killing her, which he also seemed to want to do. Turns out that him and the town posse of Wildling hunters had eradicated all of the Wildlings sixteen years ago. But he decided to secretly keep her. Why? We never. Find. Out. Later on, because you can’t kill Chucky, he comes back with the gang to hunt Anna down. But when he finds her, he tries to cut the baby out of her womb. He tells her that he’s going to name it after her. Again: why? We never. Find. Out. A little motivation would go a long way here. Tragic backstory with his own dead kid? He shooting blanks? What? What is it? Why is it? Of course, because she’s pregnant, she’s able to overcome the effects of anesthesia, unhinge her jaw (?!) and kill her Daddy. Righty-then.
The Creature:
The transformation is ugly, which I can get behind. If you’ve ever had those “teeth falling out” nightmares (hello anxiety) you may hate this. At one point, she’s kissing her love interest and her mouth just starts pouring blood and she spits her molars into the sink. It’s pretty great. Pointy teeth start poking through to replace them. Her nails start getting dark streaks, and eventually turn into claws. I like that the transformation is paced out a bit - she’s not hulking out into a Wildling. Let’s skip over the “getting darker-skinned makes you more animalistic because she was Snow White to begin with” and agree that it’s black fur that erupts over her face. Even though it starts off as a sort of mud-mask camo? Then she just…is that color? And also it very clearly isn’t fur. Oh, and she gets some glowy eyes. That’s really about it. Otherwise, she still looks like a person. Or like a Neanderthal? It’s kind of a CGI mess at points - when she unhinges her jaw and half her head opens like a muppet - but the very last shot of her in practical creature makeup is actually stunning.
Pictured: Not blackface? She’s just no longer human. So she can’t be white anymore.
The Plot:
As far as the actual story goes, it’s simple but not executed in an interesting way. Setups are blandly introduced and get paid off in ways that aren’t satisfying. She has visions of the northern lights, so she just…goes there. That’s where her kind are, which we could have guessed. She gets shown a porno by her love interest to show her “where babies come from” (when, in context, it would have made more sense to show her a birthing video) and she later has sex with him and gets pregnant. We see a skull with pointy teeth and the next thing you know, her teeth are falling out and are replaced by pointy teeth of her own.
It’s just…meh. Nothing shocks or surprises. No reveals. Interesting possibilities float into the picture and aren’t grabbed. Everything just happens so that the story can go on without conflict.
The plot is simply that a cloistered teenage girl with Daddy issues is let out into the world, has sex with the first boy she meets, gets pregnant and runs away to find her real family. And, um, turns into a creature along the way, which her Daddy and his friends don’t like, so they try to kill her. But they don’t. She’s fine, her baby is fine. Her baby-daddy and his sister, the worst Sheriff ever, are fine. No repercussions for them. Bad guys get what was coming to them. It’s all just fine.
So if it’s all just fine, then Why the metaphors?
Tackling the puberty metaphor first: It’s not really a metaphor if the story follows the literal maturation and sexualization of a young girl and ends with her being pregnant and having a baby. That’s not womanhood. This is what I mean about the movie not elevating itself: Wildling is about the literal physical changes of sexual maturity. Nothing more. Anna doesn’t evolve emotionally unless you count the ham-fisted crutch of she’s become a mother so she has a reason to live. She gains some knowledge about her past, pouts a little at her authority figures (Daddy and the terrible Sheriff) but does not mature in any way besides physically. And the movie lets you know that by physically, they mean sexually. From the tub scene where we can see her breasts (keep in mind, she’s supposed to be sixteen ffs), to the chemistry the movie decides she has with the only boy she knows, to the sex scene in the woods, all the way up to the furry, engorged, CGI pregnancy-breasts that flop around as she thrashes.
And the motherhood thing again: most mothers don’t get pregnant on purpose and an increasing amount of women are choosing not to have children at all. There are also women who can’t have children, or who do not birth their children. Equating womanhood with motherhood - especially pregnancy and birth - completely lessens everything it is to be a woman.
Playing Devil’s Advocate to myself, you might be able to say that her lack of character growth is her “being true to her wild feminine self” - but in that case, she wouldn’t be trying to hide her transformation. And it wouldn’t have been a man who showed her the truth of herself and her past. I’m not even going to elaborate on this scarred man wearing wolf skins who she meets twice in the woods - because the movie didn’t. At all.
Real quick though, if they were going to address Daddy issues, they could have also gone this route: With the Wolf-Man as a Shifter or Wildling (possibly the last one) who seduces Anna with the knowledge of her natural self. He’s older, wiser, more wild. It works at first, this dark (but unfulfilled because she’s sixteen) sexual attraction between them. But he’s a killer and she decides that she has a choice in how wild she wants to be and how and with whom she wants to spend her life, so she fights to leave him. Maybe even kill him - bests him using the knowledge and instinct he’s taught her to tap into - and she has to grieve the loss of a potential teacher and lover but she can step out on her own and discover who she is. (Have you read The Witching Hour or seen Stoker? They’re weird stories that make me feel weird about myself. I like it.) This didn’t happen. Not even close.
The only real metaphor is our second option: Vague Statements About Nature. In this scenario, we have Mankind keeping Nature in a cage. Controlling it. Suppressing it. Loves it as much as He hates it. But Mankind is self-destructive and Nature will always find a way to return to its wild Self. To propagate. To survive. Mankind will roil against it, but Nature will not be, and cannot be, stopped.
This of course is a flowery way to hand-wave away all of the many, many, problems with the movie but it’s one I’ll accept. Equating a senseless teen pregnancy with the chaotic impulses of nature (rather than womanhood) sits better as a story device. It’s just too bad the story doesn’t lean in this direction at. All.
Even visually, though this small town is nestled against what is apparently a dense forested area, including a mountain where a pack of Wildlings once lived in seclusion, it doesn’t ever feel wild. The forest seems close, accessible, tamed. Domesticated. When she runs off into the woods, it never feels like she’s deep into anywhere. Probably because it’s only ever a few moments before she meets someone there. The Wolf-Man, the Sexual Assault Kid, the very house she grew up in - all seem to be within easy reach. There are even booby traps set up (by the Wolf man? Why? We don’t know. Besides it being another obvious setup with an equally obvious payoff). How wild is this wilderness if there are so many people in it? The camera wants to portray vastness, but due to the storytelling it never stops feeling absolutely shallow.
But what always bugs me the most about a movie that seems kind of into itself like Wilding, is the amount of Things That Don’t Make Sense:
Why isn’t Chucky’s desire for a child explained?
Why would someone who lives in the country report a gunshot? (believe me, they don’t)
How did Chucky get Endometriosis medication?
Why does Liv Tyler as the Sheriff assume the girl who she knows A) never had a period and B) was a literal prisoner - knows how to use tampons? She’s flat-out surprised that Anna is clueless.
Why didn’t Chucky’s posse turn on him when they found out he was hiding a Wildling as a secret daughter?
Why did Chucky want to cut the baby out of her? Does he just want a kid? Why??
Does the whole town know about Wildlings? Or just every grown man that we see in the movie that’s not a doctor?
Does Anna know how to take care of a baby? Does she know what a baby *is*? Even animals fuck up the first try a lot of times.
Are we not going to explain the man wearing a wolf pelt -including the whole wolf head atop his own - at all? Really? He’s just like, in town. He’s sitting on a bench outside the liquor store on the main road when Anna is driven in. He seems to know what she is from that distance. He’s got a scarred face, cloudy eye and is wearing wolf skin as clothes and we’re not going to say anything about him? Is he a shifter? Is he just a vessel for exposition? He’s not even a person of color, like, I know that would be stereotypical but him being a white dude in the middle of a white dude town only makes me absolutely burst with more questions. WHO IS HE, WILDING? JUST WHO THE FUCK IS HE? He’s not a Wilding, you establish that. Is he just exposition man? Why not have a lady librarian have all that exposition, since that’s where Anna learns everything else like in every other movie - oh, let’s go to the library to learn about predators because that’s the easiest way to convey exactly what our character is learning. From text books. With pictures. Not experience. That would be too vague. This is what’s wrong with our educational system, and by gods damn it’s a big part of what’s wrong with this movie.
You know what another big part is?
Liv. Tyler.
Not only does Liv Tyler do nothing for this movie, the character isn’t even likable.
I don’t know who thought that Liv Tyler could act as a gum-chewing, truck-driving, uniform-wearing, hamburger-eating Sheriff - but, no. The problem isn’t that she’s a woman. The problem is that you’re putting an Elf in a police costume and trying to pass her off as a human. Liv looks as uncomfortable as she does unnatural in a police uniform. I can not believe that she knows how to fire up the grill or knows what goes with ketchup. And the human she’s posing as is kind of an asshole.
When we first meet Sheriff Liv, she’s chewing gum in a way that clearly indicates that she’s never done it before. As if the concept of “no, you just, you chew it” doesn’t click. I can’t describe it, it’s something you have to see. She’s holding this gum in her mouth like someone told her it’s a secret she has to keep there, safe. And that if she bites it too hard something bad will happen. I don’t know. Anyway, the Sheriff doesn’t really step up and offer to take Anna with her - Anna asserts that she’s going with Liv and Liv is cool with it. Even smirks like, yeah, see? Homegirl TOLD you. We’re women. WO-MEN. We vibe. I’m totally down.
And then the first encounter we have with them in the real world is her making fun of Anna for “not liking my driving. I’m only going twenty miles per hour”.
She…Liv, she’s been a prisoner her whole life. You know this. Isn’t this like the biggest case you’ve ever had in this town? Didn’t you investigate the house at all? You *know* she’s been kept in one room for as long as she can remember until she woke up in a fucking hospital.
Then as they drive (past the Wolf-Man) we see a boy commit a blatant sexual assault in the crosswalk. Sheriff Liv honks her horn at him. The girls in the crosswalk do not laugh it off. They clutch each other and walk away hurriedly. Liv is like “you want to stay away from guys like him”. Or, hear me out Sheriff, you want to make a report on guys like him. At the very least.
She also makes this comment that “only men are Daddies and women are Mommies and everyone has them, like it or not”. It just rubs me the wrong fucking way. It’s such a bland thing to say, but from someone wearing a uniform who seems to be the stand-in for authority in this flick, I have to wonder what the intent is. Especially considering that she’s talking to someone who was raised as a prisoner by her father figure without a mother. It’s callous at best and the line exists only to establish the function of gender roles. Because the question “are you his Daddy” posed by Anna to Liv is really “are you his parent and caretaker”. Not “what is your gender”. This doesn’t even lead to a discussion about parents, which might have been interesting. Was it cut? Because without the context of “let’s talk about how you sometimes don’t have parents, or the person who raises you may not be the best” it’s just this random thing to say without context or nuance that definitely needs both.
When Liv has Anna home the first night, she leaves the bedroom window open in Anna’s room. This spooks Anna, who verbalizes that she wants it closed because of the scary stories Chucky used to tell her about the evil Wildling. Sheriff Liv completely discounts both this fear and Anna’s clear request and leaves the window open.
When Anna gets her first period, Liv tosses her a box of tampons and is like you know how to use these, don’t know? You don’t? For fuck’s sake, Liv. We were there when the doctor told you that she’d been receiving daily shots to stop her period. Even so - she’s been a prisoner since birth. What is so shocking about her not knowing what the fuck a tampon is?
She straight-up arrests Anna for murder without questioning her or providing her legal counsel, due to the discovery of highly circumstantial evidence that just as easily seems to indicate that a sexual assault took place - by the same kid who she saw sexually assault the girl in the crosswalk. Sure, he’s dead now due to a gnarly bite to the throat, but she doesn’t take Anna to get a rape kit done, or try to help Anna in any way, at all. Guilty until proven innocent.
The only real good Liv does is get knocked out so that Anna can escape the cell she put her in. I get it, Anna. Run away. Fuck people.
Review:
Wildling is a beautiful movie that doesn’t take any risks, resting on surprisingly conservative traditional social values and the almost boring sentimentality of the nature of women and nature itself. For such an attempt at grand metaphors, the story comes off as small-minded and uncomplicated. There is no internal conflict, no real challenge. Nothing is uncomfortable. It’s very clear who the bad guys are. For what it’s worth, I find Bel Powley captivating and the practical effects are well-done in that one scene. The movie is easy on the eyes, as unchallenging as the plot. We don’t get many creature movies at all - so I’ll take it.