[Content warnings for this page: mentions (but not details) of abuse, and general discussion of trauma. There are also spoilers for La Casa Lobo. If you haven’t seen it, you could watch it here (rent/buy, supports the filmmakers) or here (free, with ads).]
What is most impactful about La Casa Lobo is the way it unsettles, disrupts, and grafts realities.
The narrative is presented as a found propaganda film from the archives of “La Colonia”——a semi-fictionalized version of the real Colonia Dignidad, a cult founded in Chile in 1961, and home to a laundry list of horrors including the torture and sexual abuse of children, and operating in collaboration with Chilean secret police as a death camp for political dissidents under Pinochet’s fascist regime.
Combining stop motion and wall painting animation styles, and taking on the narrative structure of an allegory or cautionary tale, the story follows María, a young girl who has escaped from the commune, as she hides and raises two pigs in an abandoned house. Throughout the story she is stalked and harassed by the titular wolf.
Within this found footage structuring, the tools León and Cociña employ most effectively to destabilize reality are their unreliable narrator, and an inconsistent movement and layering of time.
+++
La Casa Lobo is narrated in Spanish, by a syrupy voice claiming that what you’re about to watch is a film, “rescued from the vaults of our colony”, to “dispel the horrible rumors that have stained our reputation”. The actual Colonia Dignidad did create a large archive of propaganda films, so it is implied that the voice is a stand-in for its founder Paul Schäfer, a former Nazi soldier who fled Germany to avoid the repercussions of accusations that he had sexually assaulted young boys. The wolf, who speaks in German, is never contextualized beyond what can be gleaned through his hissing threats to María. Their disembodied voices serve as a dual-antagonist to the only other voice in the film, María’s. Noticeably, the wolf and the narrator share a voice actor.
This grafting of wolf/narrator is never addressed explicitly, but there are cues at the first instance of the wolf’s voice. María is watching television and speaking about her hope for her future with the pigs. The narrator tells us (in Spanish) that she looks happy. The voice coos, “Maríííííía, Maríííííía”, then suddenly, he is speaking German. The camera pans, slowly, to the television, where static clears to show live action footage of a wolf. Whether the shift from narrator to wolf happened before or after his attention moves from you to her (or whether it’s even a true shift), is unclear.
Together, the narrator/wolf employ time against a stable reality; the narrator often describes to the viewer what is happening on the screen——always in tense that implies that he is there with you, in the present, looking back on events that transpired previously. But at times he slips; he speaks of María being missing in the present tense (particularly disturbing, considering that at the end of the film she seemingly decides to return to the commune). At one point he offers, “María doesn’t listen to me any more, but I know you do”, grafting together both versions of present tense; the present of viewing the story with you, and the present tense of the moment in the story itself. He is seemingly in two realities at once, and alongside him, you are too.
The slippage is subtle, but the impact is visceral. The fact that we are being lied to is made clear from the start of the film (since it is presented as archival documentation but is very visibly constructed animation, and because it’s pretty intentionally set up to be read as propaganda), but it is destabilizing as a viewer to be situated within multiple, constructed presents; where none seem safe. The wolf’s delicate antagonizing, the narrator’s sly manipulation, are not only directed at María, but at you. The wolf/narrator does this throughout the film, reinserts himself in moments of calm, alternately speaking privately to you the viewer, and addressing María sternly.
+++
These disruptions are a reflection of the intentional fracturing of realities caused by a dangerous manipulator; fractures which can migrate inward as a result of trauma. The purposeful inability to trust the film’s narrator/wolf as a disembodied speaker builds a general mistrust of voice: who are we really hearing? If you can’t trust what the wolf/narrator is saying, can you trust what María is saying? Can you trust your own thoughts?
This mistrust also builds important openings for some of the larger conversations of La Casa Lobo, such as white supremacy. María is shown throughout the film as having blonde hair and blue eyes. She speaks both Spanish and German, but primarily Spanish, and only German was spoken within the walls of Colonia Dignidad——which together imply that Maria is Chilean, not German. So who is responsible for this projection of her appearance?
+++
The narrator/wolf is seemingly controlling the narrative, but Maria speaks in first person too, so whose story is this really? No one reality ever completely tracks; and the lines between narrator, first person, viewer, and object reconstruct and rebuild themselves alongside the animation.
La Casa Lobo was animated over the course of five years, in twelve different galleries (which were open to the public, to view the process) across five countries. Their full, human scale animation style has precedence (look to the work of 1980’s Czech animator Jirí Barta who similarly animated large found objects using rooms as sets; or street mural animators like Blu), and their aesthetic has a visible genealogy following stop-motion greats like Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers.
Švankmajer’s Alice is unsettling because of his animation style, yes, but even the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland is pretty bizarre. It adds a layer of weird, but the story isn’t dependent on it. What separates León and Cociña’s film is that the animation is not only a tantalizing and technically impressive visual element, but an essential component of the storytelling itself.
Rather than what you might imagine in stop motion, puppets with armatures that allow them to bend and move, the characters in La Casa Lobo are stiff structures that are in a constant state of being built and rebuilt on order to move. An arm does not bend at the elbow with the aid of a hidden joint——it disintegrates from the fingertips and rebuilds itself anew in the shifted position. The audio track amplifies this approach; you hear not only the expected narrative sounds (breathing, doors opening, the screeching hum of electric bulbs, characters speaking), but also the sounds of the animated construction and deconstruction (something adjacent to the sound of chalk on a chalkboard, an almost wet skittering sound of masking tape being stretched again and again over foam to create an arm). “Reality” breathes. Characters shift size and medium. Sometimes Maria is a petite mannequin-like construction of masking tape and cardboard, sometimes she’s a ten-foot-tall head painted on a wall. Rooms morph into one another, nothing feels wholly grounded. It becomes hyperreal.
+++
In this same way, time is shown as an elastic and unsteady construct. It stretches on, snaps, takes on incompatible layers, disguises itself.
La Casa Lobo is edited to look like one long, continuous shot, but within that forward motion, we are shown that time is not so simple, nor is it impervious to the manipulations of the wolf/narrator.
After a fire, the camera pans over a burnt room. It pauses, and a charcoal eye appears on the wall. The wolf calls for María, “Maríííííía, can you feel me my little bird? Can you hear me?” Their weighted interaction (the longest between them in the film) reveals that she does not know where he is, but that he can see her. “Let me in”, he demands. “No”, she replies, “I don’t want any more punishments”. The eye disappears, and a clock takes its place on the wall, its second hand spinning erratically, while the minute and hour hands stay frozen in place——then jolt forward forty minutes, before resuming normal motion, as the camera too resumes its slow tracking through the house.
The wolf acts like a black hole, pulling time into himself and spitting it back out in unpredictable ways.