Time Of The Wolf Reviews

Grim exercise in survival.

Temps du loup is a very bleak French drama about a mother trying to survive in post-apocalyptic France with her 2 young children. It is a film which portrays the future as a grim exercise in survival. You will watch this thinking if this is survival, why bother.Terrifically acted. If this was an American film, it would be an action adventure Sci-fi. Being French, it is just the opposite, a thought provoking drama well worth watching. But don't expect an optimistic future.

Time to count sheep

The Americans have faced attacks by aliens, been deluged by all manner of cataclysmic disasters and been threatened by countless strains of deadly viruses. Even us Brits have had our fair share impending judgement days. However, Haneke?s Frenchmen it appears will have to cope with livestock dying, brief scuffles and the slight possibility of being raped - hardly the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse now is it?

Now don?t get me wrong I deplore the gung-ho action rubbish that Hollywood churns out these days but at least they are focussed on telling some sort of tale, all-American gunk or otherwise, which is more than can be said about Haneke?s effort. Does he want this to be a human drama? Well perhaps if he had actually developed some characters with an ounce of depth and emotion it would have been. Is it a tale about the struggle of humans in a survival scenario? Not unless your idea of surviving an impeding doom involves waiting at a drab train station for the 10.45 to Bordeaux.

People will argue that the film is meant to be subtle and that it conveys a more humanistic approach to the ?disaster? genre, rather than just cramming it with special effects. However for that direction to work you need to be drawn into the plot and experience the anxiety, the panic, the helplessness that these characters feel. However, here you have little character or plot development and you are left asking who are these people? what have they left behind and even, what are they running from? This audience isolation is further compounded by the fact that the setting is an open countryside and so there is little room to generate the sort of powerful atmosphere created for example in the opening of ?28 Days Later?.

As you can gather I didn?t enjoy this film. The pace of the film was slow, the dialogue unnatural and overall it felt like a dreary shell of a film. I find it hard to recommend this film to anyone but going from the other reviews on here it?s a film can be enjoyed. A lowly 2 out of 5.

Extras - Biographies (Michael Haneke, Isabelle Huppert, Patrice Ch?reau & B?atrice Dalle but be warned the writing is small), Making of feature (20m), Cannes Featurette (6m) & Trailer

Subtitles ? Easy to read

Not the fastest thing on a silver disc...

Nominally a science fiction film, Time Of The Wolf follows a group of refugees trying to survive in the countryside after some unknown disaster has caused havoc in the cities. Food is scarce, water too, and the whole of France (this is a French film) is reverting to anarchy.

A mother (Isabelle Huppert) and her children struggle to find food and shelter - something they're totally unprepared for. They meet up others like them, adrift and frightened, as well as those better prepared who are taking advantage of the refugees.

Time Of The Wolf is a little bit like The Day Of The Triffids, part of the 'cosy catastrophe' genre, where things have gone very very wrong - but not *too* wrong, not yet.

It's not a big budget production - there's no inkling given of what the background disaster is, other than that it seems to involve food shortages and a general social collapse. The whole film is set in the countryside, so it's only the actions of the people there that illustrate that we're in the middle of a disaster (which is rather a clever way of doing things, I thought).

The real, big, fat, central problem with Time Of The Wolf is that it's intolerably S L O W.

Not very much happens. When it does it takes a frankly ludicrous amount of time. Scenes that in a Hollywood movie would occupy - at most! - 30 seconds, here take about 20 minutes. It's nice to see a non-sensational end-of-the-world movie that takes a bit of time to think about the smaller issues and personal stories that might accompany doomsday, and some parts of Time Of The Wolf are eminently watchable and fascinating

BUT!

I'm a patient man, I like foreign and arthouse films, I enjoy quiet contemplative movies, and even I *still* thought Time Of The Wolf could have been a much much better film if it hadn't been intent on showing endless lingering shots, often minutes long, to illustrate a really very minor point.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly wouldn't want Hollywood to remake this (they'd only add lots of CGI wolves and feature Ben Affleck as a heroic refugee who sorts everything out), but Time Of The Wolf is a particularly fine example of the way some decent French cinema can be swamped by its more self-indulgent aspects.

So, a reasonable 110 minute film that could've been a very good 80-90 minute one.

Oddly enough, the long absent Beatrice Dalle (of Betty Blue fame) has a minor part in this film too.

No Compromise

As with his earlier film Funny Games, Michael Haneke offers no comfort in Time Of The Wolf. Yet the beauty of Haneke is that he takes a subject, a set of circumstances, and creates a real yet totally compelling world in which his characters either choose or are forced to exist. The shocking first five minutes are uncompromising, again depicting violence and its aftermath as real, a theme in his work. Not always easy viewing, never-the-less Time Of The Wolf offers a sobering image of 'how things could be'.

Not easy, but ultimately fulfilling

Temps Du Loup demands a lot of the viewer. The opening scenes provide no clue as to what is happening, or why, and you are left to piece things together for yourself. What emerges is a very human story of the daily struggle for survival following some kind of disaster, as seen through the eyes of a mother and her two children, all of whom react to events in different ways.

The lack of melodrama, special effects and even a soundtrack force attention on the minutiae of the interactions between the characters, which in a film where nothing much is happening leaves the viewer struggling to find meaning as much as the characters on screen. The film's minimalism does not lessen its impact, however, and I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.

This modern fable is made even more poignant by the realisation that these events are a daily reality for many refugees around the world.

[Highly rated reviewer]

more challenging work from Haneke

Isabelle Huppert and her family arrive at their country home packed with supplies only to be confronted by a desperate family who have taken posse ion of their home. Isabelle’s husband gets shot and she and her kids have to flee and cross a landscape where they encounter others in desperate situations, food is in short supply and trade in goods is the main commerce. Groups huddle together like refugees trying to eke out an existence.

Some form of disaster has taken place but what it is or how it happened we are never told. We don’t really need to know as in the context of this film it doesn’t matter. What does matter is how people deal with each other in times of crises. How we think, feel, react, communicate and basically try and live as human beings.

Michael Haneke’s films are probably an acquired taste but there’s much to get from his work if you take the time to discover them.

difficult

This is one of Hanecke's more difficult films, which I think by itself says a lot. Very slow at times, but over all a treat if you are patient enough.

Slow and unsatisfying

Whilst the film is certainly effective at portraying the grim futility of a post-apocalyptic France, this unanswered futility simultaneously leads to a film experience that seems rather pointless.

The question 'Is there any value at all to this existence?' as portrayed in the lives of the characters populating the film, consequently leads one to ask the corollary question, 'Is there any value to this film?'

Ultimately it does perhaps suggest, or hint, at some possible answers to this question, but it cannot rescue the fact that this film offers a rather unsatisfying, ponderous and somewhat tedious experience.

Despite all this, the film is undeniably effective and subtle at portraying the emptiness of the existence the characters face, and this emptiness is something that we can all perhaps recognise to at least some small extent in our own lives (irrespective of how satisfied (or not) one is with one's life).

But the emptiness is all you will get out of this film. Certainly no hope, and unfortunately it won't help you approach any sort of meaning. Is there even a 'message' in this film? Long drawn out shots, extensive use of silence and little development or action does not necessarily imply sophistication or art in film.

I feel this film deserves 2.5 stars, for it nevertheless has some power; despite on the other hand its disappointing incompleteness and unsatisfying lack of coherence.

The slowest paced story I've ever watched

The idea of post apocalyptic France is what got me interested in this title, but unfortunately it looks just like present day countryside, albeit with muted colour tones and much less people. This is the slowest paced story I've ever watched. I think the director was maybe trying to make the viewer share in the depressing monotony of the characters' lives, but frankly this is not why I watch a movie. Why the heck would I want to sit and watch a little boy sitting quietly taking bite after bite of a biscuit, or spend about two minutes looking out through the window of a train at passing countryside.

zzzzzzzzz...

I watched this on 2x fast forward and still thought it was dull. Lots of hanging around in a railway station. A horse gets stabbed too...not very nice. That's the French for you.

Did the train come at the end? I'm not sure..