The Angulo brothers’ pastime was remaking their favorite movies.
There are legends of children raised by wolves far away from civilization, and tales of princes and princesses kept hidden away in towers looking down upon worlds they cannot know. These two classic stories meet in the entrancing documentary The Wolfpack.
The wolf princes in question are the Angulo boys, six brothers confined for 14 years to an apartment in a high-rise housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where their preferred pastime was filming remakes of their favorite films (we get to see their takes on Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan).
Just like the storybooks, where tales end with heroes taking a furtive step back into the world, the film shows the Angulo boys venturing out into the Bowery. We get the thrill of watching these six learning to navigate a world we take for granted.
Mukunda is the first to escape when, at the age of 15, he sneaks out for a couple of hours of weird freedom. He wears what might be the most conspicuously terrifying costume possible. After the police bring him home, the parents agree to allow the boys a little liberty.
Outside their family, “real life” has always consisted of distant figures walking down Delancey Street far below. They have been isolated for so long that they are amazed by trees and amused by the pervasive use of the word “like.”
First-time director Crystal Moselle was given remarkable access to their tiny household and their old home movies — all the more amazing considering the family’s reclusive tendencies.
She is not as flashy as her subjects’ favorite directors, but she is a master at capturing small moments. She allows a support beam to bisect a shot separating one of the boys from the people he’s trying to mingle with, and frames another brother in his Dark Knight costume in a window looking down at the city, like so many Batmen before him.
The Wolfpack is not without sorrow and bitterness. But Moselle mainly captures the brothers’ joy in their newfound freedom and in their togetherness, whether it’s going to Coney Island for the first time or cooking with their mom in the kitchen.
Moselle clearly feels for the mother, who is herself removed from the world, but the director’s greatest trick is building an air of mystery around the father, Oscar. Paradoxically, he kept his children confined to protect them from a world he sees as a prison. He is not visible for the first half of the film, yet we feel his presence shuddering the walls of the apartment. It makes us wonder if the boys are braver for getting out or for coming home.
Underscoring it all is a love for movies. Film fans can see themselves reflected in the way the boys quote lines and mimic characters (they have a spot-on Buscemi and Travolta) and view life through the prism of film. We are allowed to be with them for the first time they go to a movie theater. What wonder! It was then that I lived vicariously through the boys who were raised vicariously.