It is bizarre to watch a film as relentlessly gloomy; as impeccably shot and as seemingly brim full the notion that great danger might very well be lurking around the corner just hit the wall and die in the way that Time of the Wolf does. Here is the post-apocalyptic movie wherein we do not get the feeling the apocalypse has actually happened; here is the film depicting the fallout to a great terror wherein we actually feel unthreatened, unthreatened by not only what this newfangled world looks like but additionally by the very item that brought everything to what it now resembles. It is a strange thing indeed; not anything that transpires within, but how relentlessly dull Austrian director Michael Haneke actually makes the end of civilised life in France actually look. To think that the likes of then-recent French films La Haine and Irreversible actually set themselves within functioning societies as we know they exist, yet still managed to construct what felt like a bubbled universe of decay and hatred, is extraordinary.
In its purest of forms, the film is barely much more than a cluster of people bedded down in a single location for its entire duration - during this time, people sit; stand; speak; argue; walk around and wait for a train to arrive. This was fine, when it was Sydney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Ah yes; the train: the reason for the likelihood of a train coming and going is that these people occupy a railway side signal booth, a small but large enough structure in the remote ruralness of somewhere-or-another which they all inhabit as the skies cloud over, the grimaces on the characters' faces tighten and everyone lives in fear of........some wild dogs.
The lead is Isabelle Huppert's Anne Laurent, a woman whose husband is killed in front of her and who must flee a holiday property with her two children, Ben and Eva, when what appears to be a group of squatters ambush them upon arrival. Aghast, they are sent away into the gloomy new world of death and terror without supplies or any clue as to what's happening. Seven years before John Hillcoat's The Road, itself an episodic and somewhat patchy post-global catastrophe flick in need of some serious revisions in regards to its ending, they wonder around varying country streets and dirt roads unaware of what's happened. It is around this point that they meet a young woman who outlines the severity of the situation and invites them along to that aforementioned signal box. En route at night, sheep are heard in the nearby proximity of the Laurent's and then found eerily mangled the following morning, whereas a measure of the newfound world we're all now living in is exemplified when the stumbling across of a dead individual induces the taking of said corpse's jacket, on account of the fact they no longer need it. It is very much dog-eat-dog, or rather dog-eat-you-if-you-aren't-careful-enough. I think.
Some will take to it as a gloomy, pent up and claustrophobic masterpiece churned out by one of modern cinemas more exciting auteur's via a film industry (in the French) who rarely put a foot wrong when Luc Besson isn't involved. I say it's the same scene peddled over and over for the sort of cheerless thrills which wear thin after about twenty minutes. Time of the Wolf's greatest sin perhaps lies with its inability to be able to purvey the required amount of fear linked to the scenario, nor indeed provide us with enough in the form of reasons to empathise with anyone involved. Where Haneke bites off a solid chunk of this post-apocalyptic genre infused approach, he decides to spin it in a way which is ambitious although ultimately flat and unaffecting. When lined up against the frighteningly distanced tone found in 2002's 28 Days Later, or that immense sense of hopelessness and confusion omnipresent throughout Night of the Living Dead, Time of the Wolf trips over its own sky-high aspirations and dulls the senses when it ought to be stirring them. Haneke was much more pleasurable, if that is the correct word, when he subverted traditional codes of a certain branch of the horror film in Funny Games.
In terms of characterisation, at least Hillcoat's aforementioned The Road had this often quite touching central bond between a father and son as the elder readied the younger for the day he may no longer be around. There was a depressing air of inevitability about the exchanges; as if there was something deep down that was acknowledged, although ultimately unspoken, between the two of them and we felt the intensity of their plight between not only the odds but one another. It is films like Time of the Wolf you might say are fabricated to catch the viewer out, a film one watches and takes note as its air of pomposity becomes more obvious; a film very gradually insinuating that it is illegal and stupid to take to something like Synder's remake of Dawn of the Dead over that of Time of the Wolf, as if watching a horror film such as this one in which the threat is off screen and unspecified is good or "correct" whilst a bit of on screen splatter and cut-and-dry zombies being the clear antagonists for idiots. There is a patronising, overly confident tone to Time of the Wolf; a false, distanced attitude to its proceedings which is unpleasant and stiff – as if it were continuously making a point on how bad most films of Time of the Wolf's ilk usually are and how intelligent and mediative this one is. Regardless, I'll happily spend time trapped in a shopping mall over there with those guys in that Romero flick than that of the signal box with these people any day.
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