Short Round: Big Bad Wolves (2014) ****/*****
Co-writers/directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado have said that their new film, Big Bad Wolves, is their warped way of getting revenge on their parents for all of the twisted fairy tales they were told as children. If that’s truly the case, then they can consider their mission accomplished, because I can’t imagine much more of a distressing reality for a parent than realizing you’ve raised a human being twisted enough to come up with something like this movie.
The story here is a collision course between three main forces, a rogue cop (Lior Ashkenazi) who has been trying to solve a series of child murders by any not-quite-by-the-book methods he can devise, the father (Tzahi Grad) of the most recently brutally murdered and violated little girl, and the school teacher (Rotem Keinan) who is the main suspect in the killings. All of the main players have secrets, they all have conflicting motivations, and it’s quite a bit of fun to watch them collide with one another. Well, dark fun. A huge chunk of the film is basically an extended torture scene.
Don’t let that make you think that it’s some kind of trifle or empty splatter film though. Big Bad Wolves is a layered work that’s full of intrigue, humor, inventiveness, and first-rate acting. Plus, it’s so tense that it will have your guts tied in knots by the time the end credits roll. Probably what it does best is the way it teases the inevitability that something terrible is going to happen, eases up right to the edge of that thing happening, and then creates some sort of delay so that you’re forced to squirm in your seat even longer than you anticipated. There are twists here too. Twists that make a movie that’s evil on the surface even more gross and demented than you already imagined it was going to be. Big Bad Wolves is really a great time, just be prepared to watch a movie that’s not in English if you decide to give it a chance. All of those names from earlier weren’t typos — this is indeed a movie from Israel.
