Alma & the Wolf Review: Ethan Embry and Li Jun Li Star in Michael Patrick Jann’s Uneven But Intriguing Genre-Defying Horror
There’s something peculiar about Alma & the Wolf. It all happens right from the start as we are introduced to Deputy Ren Accord (Ethan Embry) standing on the beach while holding a red balloon. His mind seems to wander into the void, only to be disrupted by a call. What is it with him and the red balloon? There’s an answer to that later on, but before that, he soon comes across a bloodied woman walking barefoot along the side of the road, looking shell-shocked while holding her dead dog covered in a blanket. He recognises her as Alma (Li Jun Li), who used to be an It girl back in the high school era.
Kill the wolf for me.
That’s the words from Alma, who wants Ren to promise her during the questioning at the police station. According to her, her dog is brutally maimed by a wolf after encountering a herd of goats. Her story seems outrageous, and it’s hard to believe from an alcoholic like her. Or is she telling the truth after all?
No doubt, the atmospheric opening act gets off to a promising start, making me wonder how the story will go from here. And it gets weirder when Ren himself encounters a goat in the middle of the road one night and later, an anthropomorphic white wolf-like hybrid somewhere in the woods. Is he imagining things? As he tries to make sense of what’s going on, his personal life is a mess. We learn that he’s already separated from his wife. They have a young son named Jack (Lukas Jann), and the two share custody. Then, one night while Ren is off on a date with Alma, his visiting son mysteriously disappears.
Best known for his work in the underappreciated dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, before he spent the bulk of his career directing episodes for TV series like Reno 911!, The Goldbergs and The Spiderwick Chronicles, Michael Patrick Jann does a good job blending the fever dream of a mystical and psychological horror with a dash of campy humour. The fact that he embraces the increasingly surreal weirdness of the movie’s premise, reflecting Ren’s perplexed mind, makes it a quirky yet intriguing watch. The wolf design may look goofy, but it fits just right with the movie’s pitch-black comedy tone.
As the movie progresses further, Jann ramps up with more bizarre moments, including a hallucinatory dream sequence revolving around a ritual and an attack by a flame-headed woman. The movie equally works, thanks to the commitment from Ethan Embry and Li Jun Li. The former delivers one of his best performances to date as Ren, a broken man on the verge of losing his sanity, who is struggling between getting his act together and establishing a meaningful connection with his reluctant son, Jack.
As if his life isn’t torturing enough, the event revolving around the mysterious wolf only makes things difficult for him. His co-star, Li Jun Li, fresh off her solid supporting turn in Sinners, brings the right sense of enigma to her titular character.
Just when I thought Jann was heading in the right direction, it’s kind of frustrating to see the movie take an abrupt turn. All of a sudden, everything becomes dead serious, and even though the story does attempt to justify the reason behind the movie’s tonal shift, I just can’t help but find the result is awkwardly misplaced. It makes me feel as if Jann, who is working from Abby Miller’s screenplay, doesn’t trust their process well enough and feels the need to flip the script.
Personally, I don’t mind a movie with a tonal shift, but in the case of Alma & the Wolf, it is just too much to bear and nearly derails everything that comes before. If only Jann sticks to his landing until the end, it might have gotten a better result. Still, Alma & the Wolf offers decent redeeming qualities from Jann’s earlier game approach in mixing different genres, to bringing out the best in Embry and Li’s performances, to offset some of its shortcomings.
