THE Angulo brothers in The Wolfpack look like a band and come across as half-decent actors, but their actual story is a little unnerving.
Crystal Moselle’s bizarre but fascinating documentary follows the six brothers who – we soon discover – have basically been kept imprisoned in their Lower East Side apartment in New York by their parents.
They tell Moselle that their American mother Susanne “kept them sane” and that it was their overbearing and rather paranoid South American father Oscar who decided that the mean streets of New York were too mean for his children.
So while Susanne home-schooled the six boys and their sister Visnu, Oscar was obsessed with films (they have hundreds of DVDs and videos in the apartment) and so the boys could do nothing but get lost in movies.
We hear that some years growing up they’d be brought out into the open nine times, one year they got out once and another year not at all.
They have so much time on their hands indoors that the brothers transcribe entire film scripts while they watch and then design their own outfits and props (with the realistic guns even leading to a raid on the apartment by the NYPD searching for `weapons').
The brothers do brilliantly accurate re-enactments of scenes from Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas and The Dark Knight.
They say that “movies helped us create our own world” and one admits that acting out the films “makes me feel that I’m living... sort of”.
`Sort of’ indeed. They have all been deprived of their childhood, of the chance to make friends and engage with people and to explore the streets and the parks and beyond.
Mother Susanne fell in love with Oscar when she was travelling in South America, but it seems that the couple differed on their views on bringing up their children – and the hard-drinking Oscar got his way.
When he does eventually appear in The Wolfpack, his statements are rambling and incoherent and says that “my power is influencing everything”.
One of his sons says that, “I feel like my father overdid it... he was too worried... He didn’t encourage us to engage with society... he didn’t even want us to look at people.”
It is revealed that the children heard him hitting their mother and one son hints at further darkness in the house – “some things you can’t live with” – but he doesn’t elaborate.
Oscar says that the plan when the family moved to New York was to save up enough money to move to Scandinavia – but it didn’t happen.
Perhaps he never amassed enough money for the transatlantic relocation because, to quote one of his sons, Oscar rebelled against the state by not working.
Director Moselle also includes home-movie archive footage of the Angulos and, at long last, we see the siblings making their first forays into the outside world for the first time; dipping their toes in the sea at Coney Island and then going to see their first film in a cinema.
In one hilarious but tragic scene, one of the boys says of the great outdoors that “this is like 3D”.
The Wolfpack is upsetting at times but there’s a definite chink of hope at the end.
It definitely qualifies as `stranger then fiction’. And to paraphrase a line from Pulp Fiction - one of the Angulo brothers’ favourite films - the way they were brought up was “pretty far from ok”.
:: The Wolfpack (15) opens at QFT Belfast today and runs until Thursday August 27 (QueensFilmTheatre.com).
Rating: four stars
