I wish I was one of those cool people that can say “Man, this movie reminded me of The Lobster”… The Lobster… you know? that hyped movie everyone seem to be praising some time ago? The return of that actor, what was his name? Penguin guy from the new Batman movies. Anyway, I’ve only seen like 45 minutes of The Lobster… It was so boring!!! But you know what? This movie reminded me of it! Maybe I’m one of those cool people! Don’t mind me… and forget about the freakin’ lobster, this movie is better, I swear. For once, we’re not dealing with soulless individuals, in here we can actually relate to the characters and the whole premise is so weird, yet familiar… I encourage you to watch it, forget about the old classics and such, embrace this movie about a bunch of people that have “Species Identity Disorder”, a bunch of dumbasses who believe they’re animals in a clinic specializing in curing them, I swear… this is what is all about!

So, what’s the movie about? Well, let’s start from the top, shall we? Is about this boy, this youngster that believes he’s a wolf and his parents take him into this facility where people who believe they’re animals are treated. Now, what’s interesting here is that this treatment consist in trying to resist the impulse of being an animal. Sounds weird, I know, but let me explain, okay? The protagonist has this urge to howl, you know, as a wolf. In the beginning of the story he makes such an effort to not do this, as he clearly sees what happens to those who behave like animals. Long story short, they’re treated in violent ways. There’s this guy, the antagonist of the movie, Mr. Mann, who treats the patients with aggressiveness, believing that this animal identity they’re using is no more than a childish defense mechanism implemented not to deal with the external world, often a byproduct of past trauma. So, Mr. Mann, or the Zookeeper, forces the patients to prove they’re animals by making them do animal stuff… they fail of course.

Okay, but what about our protagonist? Well, he can only hold for so long his wolf impulses and when he can no longer behave like human, he descends into his animal form strongly, becoming more and more like he’s supposed to be, until no punishment or chains can hold his true nature, because to him he really is a wolf trapped in a human body. Can you see the parallels here? c’mon! we can make all kinds of bridges between this idea and the current state of liberation about sexual identity in the entire world, right? At least I feel that what the director/writer was aiming at with the idea. What struck me as something interesting about the movie is that the protagonist himself seems not to have such a human side, so this part of the narrative is reflected upon his love interest, a woman who believes she’s a cat or something like that. Not important because she’s not like him, she doesn’t truly believe she’s a cat, okay okay maybe I’m being too hard right now. What I’m talking about is that she prefers to stay trapped because she’s afraid of what could happen to her on the outside world, a fear imposed upon her by her own mother (implicitly).

In the end… well, I prefer not to say anything about that. What I do want to say is that it seems so crazy to me that this movie has such low score on IMDB, I mean what the hell is wrong with people! For some time I’ve been feeling that movies are so boring nowadays, they always explore the same nonsense and in the same binary status quo way, and here comes this strange take on love, the body, the mind, the experience of living and so many things, a movie that can actually make you feel stuff… and what happens? 5.9 score? Give me a break!