THE STORY – When a girl raised by wolves is found in the woods, she must learn to forge her own path as those around her try to exploit her for their own purposes.
THE CAST – Jessica Reynolds, Nicholas Pinnock, Marie Jung, Naomi Kawase & Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen
THE TEAM – David Verbeek (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 124 Minutes
In “The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard,” director David Verbeek plunges us into a dying world, one already halfway gone to flame and flood. The film opens not with an image but with disembodied voices: news radio reporting wildfires, unrelenting rain, and rising temperatures — soundscapes not of dystopia but of our own unnervingly real present. From there, Verbeek delivers a jagged fairy tale of survival, exploitation, and reluctant evolution. “The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard” is a startling meditation on what it means to grow up when the future has already burned down.
No one carries all of the depressing news of the world with as much dread as the younger generations. They begin to lose all hope for the future. They begin to doubt what the point of anything is. That’s how Dylan (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) explains it to his grandmother at the film’s beginning. It’s a grim conversation that ends with him looking forward to going on a hike with his girlfriend to forget it all. But that hike ends in a breakup, stranding him in a vast, uncaring forest — its grandeur captured in stunning compositions — and leads to a haunting encounter. Dylan stumbles upon a deer carcass and is surrounded by wolves. Then she appears: a feral girl crawling on all fours, growling and wordless. She is played with astonishing commitment by Jessica Reynolds in what will undoubtedly be remembered as a career-making performance. Every movement, every guttural sound feels lived-in and instinctual. Her presence among the wolves is so convincing and mesmerizing that her sudden abduction by humans feels heartbreaking.
Reynolds’ character, the “wolf” in the film’s title, is taken from her wilderness home to a white-walled hospital. There, under the watchful narration of a doctor named Tanaka (played with delicate poise by Naomi Kawase), we begin to understand her story with a philosophical question: Where does nature end, and where does humanity begin? The film gives us no backstory for how this girl came to live with wolves — a fault that lingers — but instead focuses not on “why” she is but “what” she is becoming.
Her “rescue” from this hospital of observation and examination becomes a second captivity. She is soon spirited away by a couple of doomsday preppers who wear animal masks (a fox and a leopard, respectively) and who live aboard the Sea Palace — a decaying offshore oil rig transformed into a survivalist haven. The “mother” (Marie Jung) and “father” (Nicholas Pinnock) believe the old world is dead and see the girl, whom they call One, as a kind of messianic figure for a new, post-apocalyptic Eden. What they want from her exactly remains muddled — a flaw that the film never resolves — but it’s a chilling situation that One is dropped into. They raise her in a new language, a new worldview, and a new lie: that she is free when, in fact, she has simply been re-caged.
One begins to transform. From crawling to walking, growling to speaking, we see her morph in slow, haunting increments. Still, her wolfish instincts surface at unexpected moments — often beautifully shot against oceanic sunsets and storm-churned skies. It’s these moments, when her feral past reasserts itself that the film most sharply confronts its themes. Nature is not something we can shed or domesticate — it fights. We carry it within us, just as One does. The connection between her and Tanaka — a thread of intuition, or perhaps something more — continues to flicker, grounding the film’s more mythic elements in emotional truth.
While the second act builds tension with skill, the film stumbles in its final third. The introduction of a book written by Tanaka about One’s story as she sees it feels rushed and underdeveloped. The narrative begins to drift as if unsure of how to land the many ideas it has set aloft. And yet, even in its weakest moments, the film remains visually rich and thematically potent. Verbeek never lets us forget the stakes: not just the end of the world, but the end of childhood, of innocence, of identity itself.
One eventually recognizes the truth of her situation — not just that she is being used, but that the very concept of humanity she has been taught is hollow. “They didn’t have to be brought up by animals to have an animal spirit,” Tanaka observes in narration, a line that reframes everything we’ve seen. The wildness in One is not a curse. It’s not even unique. It’s the part of all of us that has been held in man-made prisons.
“The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard” is a haunting, poetic, occasionally uneven fable for our time. It may falter in plot specifics and slow to a crawl in its final act, but it soars as an emotional and philosophical experience. Reynolds gives us a protagonist we can’t stop watching, even when she has no words, only instinct. She loses herself and finds herself again — first in claw and fang, then in the blank sterility of the human world, and finally, somewhere in between. She isn’t a symbol or a savior. She is simply free. And in a film about extinction, that freedom feels like a howl of defiance.
