WOLF'S HOLE **1/2
IDEA: Invited on a ski retreat for reasons unknown, a group of teenagers finds itself riven by conflicts exploited by a menacing, mysterious authority figure.
BLURB: “One for all, and all for one,” goes the mantra of solidarity repeated throughout Wolf’s Hole, Věra Chytilová’s eerie, ice-and-sweat horror allegory of authoritarianism. Few if any of the teenagers assembled for the film’s cryptic ski sojourn would seem to espouse this sentiment. Even before they’ve officially arrived, they are unsurprisingly rowdy and insolent, prone to juvenile shenanigans and varyingly petty or cruel forms of adolescent teasing. Chytilová knows the nasty environment that can be bred by a bunch of hormonal teens, especially ones holed up together in a cramped, dank cabin, and gives us her best, most pungent approximation of a particularly hellish sleepaway camp. But the behavior of the kids is nothing compared to the sadism of their overseers, clad in gray and black, their skin as blanched as their snowy mountain habitat. Under their paternalistic control, “one for all, and all for one” is sapped of its putative honor, its expression of group loyalty twisted into a homicidal ultimatum issued by those whose own grotesque power precedes the welfare of the group. The parallels to communism and any number of totalitarian regimes is clear, if often vexingly schematic. Yet Chytilová’s admiring adoption of genre idioms - and her revelation of the provenance of the kids’ superiors - make it obvious that Wolf’s Hole is not intended to be taken as a nuanced political treatise. As she did in Daisies, the director harnesses formal anarchy as a force against arbitrary authority. Her delirious camera mimicking the energy of her unruly teens, she knows that as long as they come together to melt ossified dogmas with their youthful fire, the kids, and their future, will be alright.
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