WOLF GARDEN: An Exercise In Too Many Ideas

Independent horror has always been important to me, it is something that I will actively seek out and try to support in any way I can. When I was made aware of Wolf Garden I got particularly excited. It had been quite a while since I was blessed with a new iteration of a werewolf movie. This one was coming from writer and director Wayne David, who also plays the main character, William, currently stuck in isolation in a beautiful countryside cottage. We aren’t sure for a while why he’s there but slowly all is revealed.

The film starts out with a nightmare, or what we think is a nightmare, revealed to only be a dream within a dream scenario. This isn’t one of my favorite tropes but I wasn’t ready to check out yet, I was going to give this movie a fighting chance. William is haunted by visions and very early on is shown taking a bowl of raw meat into the woods to a mysterious location. There was something in that shed that he is clearly trying to keep alive, it was intriguing. Of course when night comes and William goes back to sleep, there are more nightmares (or memories, they didn’t make it clear and I can go either way) about his past and his relationship with Sian Altman‘s character, Chantelle.

What Wolf Garden Got Right

This movie really was a new and interesting take on the classic werewolf film. We had the girlfriend, Chantelle, bitten and instead of putting her down, her loving partner William locks her in a shed and feeds her raw meat to keep her alive. It’s very sweet if you’re the hopeless romantic type. Though the tension and mystery that is needed for such a film is very much present, I often found myself wondering what the heck was going on. That was a good thing (at first) but more on that later. The movie was also shot in an absolutely beautiful location, I would live there in a heartbeat, werewolves or not.

The story was great, the story was very much there and mostly an original take on everything we were seeing. The failing couple goes and tries to rekindle their relationship in a beautiful countryside chateau, Chantelle gets bit, William locks her up, he has to live with that, he’s haunted by the ghost of what he’s done to Chantelle as well as his possibly slowly cracking mind. Eventually, he is convinced that he has to put Chantelle down and sadly does, being scratched himself in the process. As the police arrive at William’s location, the moon is high in the sky, William has his first transformation and confronts them. Roll credits. Great, right?

What Wolf Garden Got Wrong

The way this movie was edited, I understand, was to try and preserve the mystery of what happened. I get that. But sticking to the back and forth in time, even in the third act, without warning and often while William was wearing the same costume was sometimes confusing. The film really did rely on the dream within a dream trope several times and each led to an attempted jump-scare. I’m not against jump-scares, everything has their place, but to use the same idea over and over to the same effect showed lack of imagination. The sound mix was also something they attempted to use to draw a reaction, lull us in with soft-spoken barely audible dialogue then hit us with overly loud string stabs. I found it more annoying than effective as a scare tactic.

Speaking of the barely audible dialogue, that was another thing I found fault with. It’s painfully obvious when you’re watching a movie and a line just seems forced. Someone really liked what they had written but seeing it and hearing it just sounds false or fake. Sentences that no person, living or dead, would ever say. There were many occurrences of that as I watched this film. I would look at the screen and even say it back, just to see how it tasted in my mouth. It tasted bad. One more draft could have fixed a lot of those problems. I’m a stickler for words and what order someone might arrange them when speaking or writing, I don’t know, it just bothered me.

Conclusion

There is a movie here. In fact, I would dare to say there is a very good movie here but the editing and the forced non-linear structure ruined it. There was no reason to do that with the story they were trying to tell other than to also force the dream within a dream scare tactic on us. The movie tries to be a horror movie when in reality what we have is a tale about what we would do to try and preserve the one we love. Leaning harder into what the heart of the story actually was added with another pass on the final draft and we could have had a very interesting story about a man trying to keep his loved one alive who ultimately fails and becomes a werewolf himself.

As it was, Wolf Garden tried to do too many things and never found a solid identity. The film either intentionally or accidentally causes so much confusion that it’s hard to follow what exactly is happening. Is “the visitor” (played by Grant Masters) actually there or a figment of William’s slowly cracking mind? It is never made clear and even that is okay but with so many questions the film is forcing us to answer on our own, adding that one, seemed like an exercise in brain training. I won’t go as far as to say that I’m upset that I watched this movie, I can clearly see in my mind the movie it could have been. That’s the one I want to watch, the movie that should have been.

Wolf Garden was released on February 28, 2023!

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