Get Ready to Run With 'The Wolfpack,' Sundance's Amazing Documentary Discovery

"If I didn’t have movies," says one of the subjects of the new documentary The Wolfpack, "my life would be pretty boring." For attendees at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, that’s a pretty relatable statement. And it’s one of the many reasons why The Wolfpack — which premiered at the festival Sunday night — has already become one of the most talked-about films of the event. It’s a story about isolation, family relations, and the yearning for freedoms, however small. But The Wolfpack is also about the way art, in particular film, can serve as both a comforter and a conduit to the outside world.

Set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood, The Wolfpack is a years-long chronicle of the Angulo brothers, six teenagers whose fearful, controlling father has kept them sequestered in their tiny housing-projects apartment for their entire lives. They don’t go to school, aren’t allowed to talk to non-family members, and barely seem aware of the Internet.

But the brothers are permitted to watch movies, which they then re-create at home, using homemade costumes: For Reservoir Dogs, the teens employ duct-tape guns and cheap sunglasses; for The Dark Knight, one of the brothers constructs a Batman costume made from cereal boxes and a yoga mat. The Angulos are constantly quoting, watching or discussing movies, from Gone With the Wind to Blue Velvet to The Lord of the Rings (they have an estimated 5,000 movies in their tiny abode).At one point, we see countless hand-written scripts laid out on the bed, the results of hours spent watching and transcribing movies like Pulp Fiction and The Fighter. 

The Angulo brothers — Mukunda, Govinda, Bhagavan, Narayana, Jagadisa and Krsna — at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

But The Wolfpack isn’t a lighthearted, for-the-love-of-movies lark. The boys’ apartment is as much a prison as a pop-culture preserve. Their mother, Susanne — who home-schools the boys, and who also remains mostly indoors — has clearly suffered physical abuse from their father, Oscar, whom one of the Angulos refers to as a “warden.” Oscar is treated here like the shark in Jaws: A slightly menacing presence, glimpsed suddenly and briefly. When we do see him, he’s often drinking or watching multiple TVs at once.

But director Crystal Moselle — who first met the boys in 2010, during one of their rare outside jaunts — takes great care not to portray their Oscar as a thinly drawn monster: A Peruvian immigrant, he’s clearly fearful of the outside world, worrying that New York City will somehow “contaminate” his sons. As misguided (and potentially damaging) as his rules may be, he’s ultimately trying to protect his children: What parent can’t relate to that in some small way? (Though Susanne and the Angulo brothers were in attendance at the film’s Sunday premiere, Oscar apparently was not; a recent effort by the New York Times to contact him proved unsuccessful.)

Eventually, the boys begin to rebel against their father, leaving the building without his permission, and exploring their home city as though it were alien turf, one that’s still comprehensible largely through the prism of film: When they visit a tree-covered park, for example, one of the brothers can’t help but compare it to a forest from The Lord of the Rings series.

Such scenes are quietly cathartic, not only for the Angulos, but for the viewers, who slowly begin to feel like part of the family. Like so many other great American documentaries about tightly intertwined broods — a list that includes Hoop Dreams, Brother’s Keeper, and Grey Gardens —The Wolfpack succeeds largely because of the director’s patience and perseverance. For more than four years, Moselle essentially embedded herself with the boys and their mother, capturing small milestones along the way: Their first trip to the beach, their first jobs, and — in one of the film’s most touching moments — their first visit to an actual movie theater. As they leave the screening, the boys are both giddy and gobsmacked, amazed by what they’ve just experienced, and unable to talk about anything else. It’s a feeling that anyone who watches The Wolfpack will surely understand.

Sundance photo: Getty Images