Time of the Wolf (2004)

Strictly average movie

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I enjoy apocalypse movies of all types and have watched hundreds of them and am always on the lookout for more, but I must say that this is the worst apocalypse film I have ever watched.The movie doesn't even feel like a movie. The first 5 minutes of the movie are the only story you will get. From there on it is just watching dirty people suffer.I am unsure what the plot of this movie is or what story it is telling? Movies should entertain or at least tell a story.You could sit on a street corner in any city and see a more engaging story told as the world passed by.I have no idea why this film has to many high marks on IMDb. Why would I want to sit and watch someone eating cookies for 5 minutes? When the lady is looking for her son you must endure 5 minuted of her shrill voice calling "Benne" over and over. It is horrendous.This movie is like a work of art, I suppose, in that one person may see something deep and meaningful while another will only see lumps of paint. This movie is lumps of paint to me.

I'm really just trying to save other sci-fi fans from wasting their time on this one. This is probably the worst sci-fi I've ever seen. It could really use a plot (why did they leave the city? where were they trying to get to?). One hundred and nine minutes is way too long. Many takes just go on and on pointlessly. I'd say edit to thirty minutes, better yet, just make it a TV episode of The Survivors. Finally, there is some pointless background conversation that receives subtitles, but other important conversations don't get translated at all. I gave it three stars instead of one because the acting is very good and there is one really good music track while they are at the train station.

If, at the start of Time of the Wolf, you are aware of Michael Haneke's 1997 shocker, Funny Games, you may believe that this film will be treading similar grounds. Opening the film, the 2 point 4 children Laurent family arrive at their holiday shack in the wilderness of an undisclosed location. On entering, they are confronted with a man holding a shotgun towards them (his own family peering from behind him). After demanding that they hand over any goods they have, he shoots the father (Daniel Duval) dead. However, unlike the familial hostages of Funny Games, the remaining Laurent's make their way to a local for help, and the audience is startled by the matriarch, Anne's (Isabelle Huppert), admission that they had buried the father. We are certainly not in the regular world; this place is different, a point that is further exacerbated when Anne is asked if she is aware of what is going on.Time of the Wolf is unfamiliar territory concerning its central concept of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Whilst the catalyst for this disaster (?) is never revealed, there is no indication of the generic science fiction tropes of disaster. No zombie/alien, or natural catastrophe's are highlighted. The ambiguity of the nature of the devastation creates a tension that is completely absent from the ordinary, explicit films of this nature. As the family trudge their way through the countryside, they cross the distinct furnaces of bonfires, sometimes the only light source in the darkness - at one time the legs of burning cow carcasses protrude from a fire. Their final stop, a building inhabited by "survivors" waiting for a train that may never arrive.Perhaps Time of the Wolf states more about the consumer society we live in today. The shackles of consumption, and the artefacts of the modern world become useless in this context. Jewels and watches are pointless commodities, whilst lighters, water and clothing are worthy of exchange. Maybe the apocalypse is the result of dwindling resources, a reality that Earth will have to face in the future (perhaps the near), where agriculture, manufacture and natural fuel have all but disappeared. With this lack of resources, comes the desperation of the people, bringing out the worst in humanity. The strong male figures take control, whilst women are often reduced to trading in sex, and are largely marginalised in the fold. Our natural affinity as pack animals falls apart, and xenophobia erupts, targeting anything that might break the monotony and fraught situation.With a distilled colour pallet, often only lit with fire, and the bleak wilderness of fog, Haneke creates a realistic world, heaving with pain and anxiety. His precise camera movements and compositions frame the disaster as beauty. Time of the Wolf would probably not suit the regular sci-fi frequenter of post-apocalypse, it does not present itself with the same signifiers and does not portray the Hollywood hero or saviour, and it absolutely does not offer the resolution that most would need to be satisfied with. This is the hopelessness of humanity in all of its desperation, with the modern luxuries obliterated, and reduced by the lack of necessities. But with this bleakness comes horror, and the complexities of humanity. It is a hard view, but one that rewards in aesthetics, and the confluence of characters.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Really. It is not a film. It is an experience. And I do not mean that it is an experience in a Disney-fueled idiot fest where Spielberg pushes emotional buttons to get predetermined responses way. I mean that it is a true experience, and I can honestly tell you that I have never felt this as strongly in any film that I've ever seen.I saw this film in the best way possible, in that I had never heard of the movie beforehand. I only knew that it was French and post -apocalyptic, and having had good luck with my last French post-apocalyptic film "Delicatessen," I hit the play button and looked at the screen. This proved to be very beneficial. If you are reading this then you probably did not have the exact same experience - but while a bonus in my opinion, it is not necessary and usually not possible anyway.So - the experience. What does that mean? The film opens with the most subdued credits possible. Completely silent and barely legible for the small font. Then the film opens, and the one cleverly placed automobile that we will see reveals that the time period is the present, without anything else being referenced to time frame for the rest of the film. Nothing seems amiss, but within five minutes we know that something is very wrong. It turns out to be a post-apocalypse of some sort, but we do not know what type of apocalypse it was, when it happened, how widespread it was, or much of anything else about it. We can only assume that it was not nuclear because there are no references to any type of sickness. It is rather odd because we do not see much, if any, evidence of property damage. But whatever it was, people were getting down to the bare essentials of what it means to be a human being and it did not seem like much time had gone by since the event occurred, so it must have been pretty bad. Not only does it seem to be a relatively recent event, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the event was any more widespread than a hundred miles or so. And we don't know how much the people who survived know either - for all we and they know, the world outside of their general area is fine.We are dropped into this situation and left to figure it out. This is where the film starts to become an experience. Other than knowing exactly what the apocalypse was, we are on equal footing with the people in the film and as they go, we go. This has to be the most realistically human film that I have ever seen. What I mean by that is that there seemed to be no actors, no actresses, no directors, nothing but life that we are part of. Nobody stood out as a "better" actor than the others - it was not even possible. The audience is as much a part of the film as anyone in it - and most importantly there are no plot tricks and devices; no emotional button pushing; no special effects; no tricks at all. Everything that you find in this film will be gleaned as in real life and just as the people in the story glean it. The only type of device whatsoever was that a couple of scenes ran extra long; but just long enough to get you feeling whatever it is that you would feel in such a situation in reality. They are very effective - and they tell you absolutely nothing. But just as in reality, where scenes don't change by the minute and things are not always explained, you have time to sit there and just look and think, or wander off, or whatever you would do - but it is real. They're too long for 99.9% of the American audience I'm sure. I will say that many things, such as that automobile, seemed expertly placed and calculated - but they never came off as manipulative. They were simply ways of illustrating something with a picture instead of a thousand words.Just as in the beginning when the film drops you into a situation that you must join into and glean information from what your eyes can see and your ears can hear, it leaves you the same way when it ends. Actually, this film really has no beginning or ending - it's simply a chunk of time that we become part of. The ending credits are just as subdued as the starting ones were, and I get the feeling that the filmmakers would have preferred to have no credits whatsoever. Just start and stop. I suppose that that's not allowed though. Even French cinema needs to pay its bills.This is an incredibly hard film to assign a numbered rating to, but in the end I can give it nothing but a ten. Having said that, I can tell you assuredly that I will never watch this film again. Although huge in its bleakness it did not depress; on the other hand watching it again would be like taking a very bad part of my life and living it over. This is probably the only film that I have ever seen that has not one tiny speck of humor or even levity in it. Not one. It makes the most dour Bergman film look like a bit lighthearted, and I am not saying that to be funny or "witty." I really mean it. The sad part about that is that at its core this movie is about us all. It is about human beings, and it challenges all but the most casual of viewers to make some difficult predictions about what they might do in such a situation. And I hope that we would do a -little bit- better than most of the people here did.