Today, Kestrell and I finished watching an absolutely
bonkers werewolf movie from 2001 called
Brotherhood of the Wolf. It's in French, though a decent English dub is available.*
The story is based on a real historical event,
the Beast of Gévaudan, where a wolf-like creature ravaged the French countryside for a few years in the 1760s. Many historic details are faithfully recreated in the film, though it veers into extremely fictional territory as well. It's historical romance, it's horror, it's action movie, it's mystery, it's political conspiracy thriller, it's Enlightenment versus Catholicism, it has
all the tropes.
Our hero, Grégoire de Fronsac, a soldier by profession but a naturalist by vocation, has been sent by the king, not to catch the Beast, but to taxidermy its corpse (once caught) for return to the court. But Fronsac has his own ideas about what he should be doing. His independence is evidenced by the presence of his right-hand man and blood-brother, Mani, the last survivor of an Iroquois tribe. Mani is pretty awesome, but he is undeniably a Magic Indian, with all the baggage that entails.
Fronsac has relationships with both a Good Girl and a Bad Girl. The Good Girl's brother is our token disabled character, and somewhat of an antagonist for much of the film. There are more tropes throughout, but I don't need to list them exhaustively (and several are major spoilers).
The horror scenes are pretty effective, and the action scenes largely well choreographed. I only cavil because the final fight in the film *seriously* broke my suspension of disbelief. I can accept a hero handily defeating dozens of minions while shrugging off near-fatal wounds, that just goes with the territory. But that final fight almost edges into anime territory for sheer over-the-top gratuitous weapon-fu.
The film's pacing was... odd. Along with all the different genres, there was some unusual storytelling choices. Several times during the film, a major piece of the mystery plot gets off-handedly revealed to the audience in a scene that none of the protagonists are privy to. One of which is the question common to a notable minority of werewolf movies, "Is there really a werewolf here at all, or is there a more mundane explanation?" I won't answer that for you, but I will say that the answer was complex and surprising.
While set in the 1760s, the story is embedded in a frame set during the French Revolution. This has more significance to the plot than is at first apparent. One of the historical details the film adopts is that the king's failure to remove the threat of the Beast damaged the king's political standing. In an age where The Divine Right of Kings is starting to be questioned, but still official dogma, werewolves can be a surprisingly political issue.
Content warnings: Lots of gore and violence, including violence to and by animals. One distressing (though brief) rape scene. Death of some protagonists. A fair amount of R-rated-level nudity, of both men and women (though for most of my readers, I expect that's a plus). Racism (albeit frowned on by the script). Misogyny in the typically casual French way. Mocking of organized religion.
[It occurs to me, as I compose that list, that this story could be an Assassin's Creed videogame with relatively few changes. Right down to, "The final confrontation is ludicrously implausible."]
Not a great movie, but solidly entertaining. Recommended, with caveats.
* I also had the subtitles on and, as is often the case with foreign films, the subtitles and dubbing didn't always agree on how to translate. Usually in minor ways, but I was struck by a pronoun issue. The dub referes to the Beast as "it", whereas the subtitles use "she". The Beast's gender doesn't much matter to the plot, but I felt it gave a very different flavor to the story.
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