Wolves Against The World
Written and Directed by Quinn Armstrong
Starring Michael Kunicki, Quinn Armstrong, Jordan Mullins and Jim Azelvandre
Runtime 1 hour and 28 minutes
On Demand & In Select Theaters September 3, part of the Fresh Hell trilogy

by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

“Ragnarok is coming; the jaws of Fenrir, the great wolf, will open” preaches our antagonist Anders (Quinn Armstrong), replete with taxidermized wolf regalia and raw egg slowly sliding its way down his face. Wolves Against the World proclaims itself to be a “heavy metal werewolf bloodbath”, and this particular quoted scene – the turning point of the film from its droning and miasmic atmosphere to an emotionally labile bloodfest – sets the tone for such claims. Armstrong’s story, however, makes it hard to imagine the purported macro-Ragnarok, the mythological apocalypse, over the micro-Ragnarok of a trauma-bonded friendship coming to its climactic conclusion.

The second film (find the review of the first film, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick here) in Quinn Armstrong’s “Fresh Hell” trilogy, Wolves Against the World wastes no time in setting the scene that it explicitly promises – complete with subtle nods to predecessors of the neo-Nazi extreme music stories like Lords of Chaos and Green Room. Our opening shot unravels itself into the unsubtle transformation of a generic looking bearded-white-man self-disemboweling during his transformation into a wolf-creature. In this moment it isn’t terror which is conjured, but a sort of kitschy cleverness, a grin-inciting and laugh-triggering referentialism which reminds viewers of the pulpy covers of 70s supernatural horror novellas, or the grotesque but obvious practical effects of Hammer Horror films, or the baroque spectacle of 80s metal band album covers. The werewolf-transformation scene cuts to the pooling of red light over a fur-covered hand reaching for drumsticks and the camera pulls out to reveal a drum kit foregrounded by a skull and bleeding crossed-bones. You think to yourself, ah, I know what this is – and for the first half of the film: you do.

Reader, I have never been one to disparage a film which tells you exactly what it is from the first shot – in fact, in an era of overhyped ads for relatively disappointing premiers, knowing what you’re getting can be a respite from the hype-mill. Armstrong’s film advertises the relationship of two neo-Nazi metal heads who, after seven years of separation, are swung back into each other’s perpetually violent orbit. Louis (Michael Kunicki) is our reformed neo-Nazi, whom we witness speaking to school kids about his time as said neo-Nazi, educating them to the dangers and detriments of his former lifestyle. Armstrong drives this point home by privileging a scene where Louis attempts to have his twenty inch swastika tattoo covered up, only to be told that it would cost a sum of money that he very surely does not have. This, of course, provides the narrative catalyst for the rest of the film: he must visit his former best friend, band mate, and secret rich kid, Anders, subsequently facing his literal demons.

When Louis’ AA sponsor warns him, the viewer knows that the odds of Louis leaving this barn, the location of Anders’ “workshops” for men to process their feelings, are slim. This is one of the few moments of significant foreshadowing the film uses, and uses successfully. When Anders invites Louis to stay just one more night to participate in the groups’ occult ritual, “The Blót”, we anticipate the film’s mad-dash toward its climax. If you are familiar with horror films, especially those that might rely on certain tropes of folk or supernatural and occult horror, you know that accepting the invitation to the ritual is literally always the worst choice you can make. Of course, this is no exception.

This is, predictably, where the film becomes considerably more aware of its own pacing, compensating for an important, but nevertheless relentlessly dreary march through the thick, misty gray fields of rural Ohio. That oppressive exhaustion, that gray and listless color palette is not reserved just for the countryside – it follows us from the city Louis was living, all the way into the isolated landscape the rest of the film exists within. The atmosphere, itself, perhaps comments on the sort of existential ennui and meaninglessness of the lives of the characters. When Anders asks Louis who he has become, Louis replies with a shrugged off comment about just trying to survive. Identity is the fulcrum in the crossroads of this film. Maybe more explicitly – the consequences of not having a fortified, integral identity, an identity which is not reliant upon considerable external signifiers and simulacra in order to define itself. Dappling the dialogue of the film are constant allusions to the characters’ miserable pasts full of abuse, hopelessness, and yearning for importance, power, meaning, sovereignty. It's easy to see that Armstrong did his research into the usual crucible-conditions of people who over-identify with hateful belief systems and the poisonous ideal of white supremacy. These individuals in the film are poor, lonely, disenfranchised, and reliant upon fantasies where the Allfather Odin has entreated them to be warriors in a war that only exists within their imagination. It isn’t enough to make you actually sympathize with them, but it veers toward eliciting pity for them.

While the footage of the Blót, itself, is underwhelming, what is invoked stylistically is not. Anders in his DIY tribal wolf-man regalia, backlit by light as he stands, preaching with an evangelical self-belief from the bed of his pick-up truck, surrounded by a semi-circle of gangly followers, was striking enough that I paused the film for a moment to analyze the scene. This image, this depiction, felt candid and real – as if I had accidentally stumbled upon the gathering, a gathering which is probably happening in at least ten different stretches of forgotten acreage across America as I write this review. Anders’ proselytizing to a wolf-howling pack of angry white men was authentically discomfiting: a threat that is made more visceral by virtue of its exposure to reality.

This juncture, after Louis is forced to consume a psychedelic drink and witnesses the men digress into their bestial witches sabbat mosh-pit, delivers the most dynamic cinematography of the film. Through a series of maybe memories, maybe hallucinations, maybe prophetic rememberings, we witness the Helvete story, we witness the bloodshed, we witness a monochromatic romp into a virile and vicious violence under the false banner of faith.

From this point on, through the admixture of overwhelming emotional bonds and animal brutality, the film reveals itself for what it truly is: an expose on the monstrous heartbreak of how people change inside and outside of friendships. A detailing of the desperate love of brotherhood bound in mutual trauma and perverted by delusion, and corrupted by ideals. The dynamic between Louis and Anders is parallel, in many ways, to a codependent romantic enmeshment – reminding the viewer of various erotic-thrillers from the 80s and 90s, or such genre-music classics like Sid and Nancy. What happens when we tie our own identity up into someone else’s? What happens to our identity when that other person’s identity changes? How can a desperate love become an even more eager hatred? Where does rejection, abandonment, and insecurity incite the most bestial parts of ourselves? And how do we cope with no longer knowing who we are? Do we reinvent ourselves? Do we double down?

Wolves Against the World invites us to investigate how we mourn the people we love when they change in ways we simply cannot accept or refuse to acclimate for. Does the love go away, or does it become its own sick thing, its own hungry wolf at the door? For me, this film is a love story more than it is a horror story – and the most shocking parts of it are the candid, vulnerable, and raw admissions of affection between the former best-friends, and the hunger for the mythical friendship they once shared. While it might be the memory of Helvete that haunts them on the conscious level, it is a ghost made of memories, of yearning, of purpose and identity fortified by relationship, that lingers in the periphery like the recurring shots of the wolf-eyes from the darkness.

In a movie which presents itself as focusing on the banner or subject of hate, the most compelling thing I walked away from the film holding was the way in which it depicted the desperation and messiness of love. What is a more timeless and Shakespearean motif than two people so intimately bound together who must fight each other to the death, or, perhaps, seek death together? Though the film sometimes lingered too long on cheesy shots of plastic skeletons, or suffered from a touch of shaky-camera-syndrome, or accidentally taught me way more about music theory than I expected, I was still surprised by some of the emotional depth this “heavy metal werewolf bloodbath” provoked, aided alongside the genuine screen chemistry of Michael Kunicki and Quinn Armstrong, as well as Armstrong’s courage to show the verboten volcanic charge of “brotherly love”.