Doc Watch: Funny Peculiar

THE WOLFPACK (A-minus) - You couldn't ask for a spookier movie to rent than this documentary about six siblings essentially held hostage during their entire childhoods by their parents in their Lower East Side Manhattan apartment

The socially retarded kids -- six boys (the focus of the film) and their younger sister -- left the apartment perhaps a handful of times per year (one year they never left). Cooped up, they consume films and stage elaborate re-enactments. They are fond of Tarantino and "Batman." (A few of them are actually pretty good actors/impersonators.) The kids all have hair down to their waists and are mostly rail thin.

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle, fresh out of film school, ran across the boys on one of their rare fresh-air jaunts. She was invited into their home. She mixes family videos with her own footage, and it's a surreal stew.

The father is a drunk conspiracy theorist who, according to one son, has physically abused his wife. The parents met as hippies hiking the Incan trail. The father apparently doesn't have a job (he equates it with slavery), and the mother home-schools the children. The parents both share a suspicion about society. The father claims to be enlightened, and he blessed his children with Buddhist names, like Bhagavan, Govinda and Krsna. But his boys compare him to a plantation owner or a jailer. And it's hard to argue with that assessment. Only the father has a key to the apartment. One boy tells Moselle that any contact with the outside world rendered them mute zombies. (I won't bother to keep the kids' names straight; the director doesn't fully identify them until the end credits, and it's a wise move. It would be a distraction here to single out any kids by name.)

While the parents claim to have had pure motives in protecting their children from the evils of western civilization, the family life they ended up creating comes off as child abuse. Their imaginations stoked, the boys display an irrational fear of everything that lurks outside their locked door. They have a bizarrely skewed idea of how the world works.

It's not as if the parents seized the opportunity to educate the children and nurture their spirits. Rather, they created a pack of psychologically fragile freaks, their minds rotted by pulp fiction on a small screen. The father, in broken English, spouts idiotic quasi-philosophical bullshit or inarticulate rationalizations, and his wife smiles nervously and goes along. He chose to live in a rundown building in a rough neighborhood in New York and endeavored to lock out nasty elements, such as the alleged drug dealing in the elevators. It's a recipe for psychological torture.

The parents, frankly, come off as mentally challenged or simply moronic. It's as if two paranoid low-IQ outcasts holed themselves up in a wing of a mental hospital and started breeding. We watch in awe as the mother picks up the phone and finally calls her own mother after decades of zero communication.  The mother also expresses regret that her children have been denied the joys of nature.

Moselle uses ominous music, camera close-ups, and ethereal natural lighting in the cramped apartment to conjure a "Poltergeist" mood. (A Black Sabbath track is particularly effective.) There is a whiff of manipulation here, as if Moselle couldn't believe her great fortune, and decided that she must milk the story for all it's worth. But it would be unfair to suggest that she overstates or misrepresents the situation.

When the boys finally do start asserting themselves and venture outside more and more, their awkwardness is palpable. They dress like characters in "Reservoir Dogs," with dark suits and sunglasses, anachronistic hipsters. They are beyond giddy when they all go to a movie in an actual cinema, proudly waving their tickets.

But slowly, one by one, the boys begin to assert themselves and prepare to leave the nest. One boy develops an original film project, which is a therapeutic way to express his emotions and repressed feelings. He recruits family members -- and one outsider, a cute girl he's got a crush on -- to be filmed while wearing elaborate, macabre masks. It provides a haunting climax to the film, and it's a fitting visual gift to Moselle, who parlayed her incredible luck into an impressive debut of masterful real-life storytelling.


BONUS TRACK
The boys dance around the apartment joyously to this song, "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora, somewhat of an anthem of rebellion: