If you’d rather read this on the site, just click here.
Every night, mites, about a third of a millimetre long, emerge and crawl over your face. They swim through the day’s accumulated grease, mating, living, dining on your secretions while you lay there, dormant and dreaming. They are harmless, they may be beneficial, and have probably been with you since birth, living their lives in the creases and contours of your face, as much a part of it as the collection of pores and hairs that makes you, you.
We tend to think of animals as separate from ourselves. You might like your pet, you might love them, but there is a distance between the two of you. This is the framework Western thought has grown up in: a world organised along clear, distinct boundaries between the human and the non-human. It is also what has helped fuel planet-wide ecological destruction. It’s a heady cocktail of a market-driven view of the natural world as resource; a post-Enlightenment, Romantic self-importance; and the Christian assuredness that we are here to ‘have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’. Other traditions around the world, such as Buddhism, take a healthier view of things, but the Western inheritance holds that we stand at the top of everything, with neatly delineated strata of importance echoing down below us into the atomic abyss, our face-crawling mites somewhere deep down in the lowest rungs of our priorities.
Every now and again a story surfaces of some bedraggled, feral child emerging from the wild. They appear throughout history, dirty faces peeking out from the woods and the myths, and people find them fascinating. People look through the lens of that wild living and see glimpses of a strange, transgressive life, part-wild, with the fine mesh of society stripped away. Often the reality of these stories is much sadder than that, children forced from broken homes or broken places and having to scavenge themselves a life. But they linger there in the cultural subconscious, figures who transgress the neatly delineated structure of people and animal.
In film, this mixing of the human and non-human the appears here and there but is at its clearest in the figure of the werewolf. American Werewolf in London (1981) is a classic of the genre. It’s a film I was brought up with it. My dad would jokingly warn me to ‘stay on the road, keep clear of the moors’ when I would leave the house, and my young eyes would be drawn to the blank, stretching moors that border our village, my ears tracing howls in the wind. The film works around binaries – two American tourists in a remote part of England; city boys on the wild moors; and then, once transformed, the wild going back into the city, and the violent incompatibility of the two. This is what the werewolf story does, it makes the body the meeting point of the human and the non-human, and lets you watch the two tear each other apart.
Wolf (2021), is a more modern update on this kind of story. Nobody has their guts torn out on the moors. Instead, the violence is psychological, the story updated to reflect a more contemporary fascination with the internal, the swirling mental echo that is seen as the dividing line between people and animals. The film is set in a residential clinic for those who identify as animals, a place of clean lines and bland colouring, surrounded by deep green woodland that leans over the metal fence. There is a girl who believes herself to be a parrot, complete with bright, feathered costume. One boy tears his fingernail off trying to climb a tree to prove he is a squirrel. Lily-Rose Depp sees herself as a wildcat, drawing on easy-Halloween-outfit-style whiskers and crawling around puddled rooftops. George MacKay’s character, the lead of the film, is a wolf. They are all young and struggling, working through varying degrees of species dysmorphia.
The film looks at how we treat difference, how we process it. It is okay, and borrows a lot from The Lobster (2015), mainly that film’s discordant rhythm of violent seriousness and sandpaper-dry humour. It's a strange film, intentionally, using that Lanthimos rhythm to heighten the strangeness of the subjects. Strangeness is a central idea in a lot of writing on this kind of thing. The ecological philosopher Timothy Morton uses the term the strange stranger to open up our relationship with non-humans, their deep unfamiliarity. But the strangeness here is anchored by the physicality of McKay’s performance, the earnt reality of his movement letting the film seriously grapple with strangeness. McKay’s talked about how he trained to get his body to move like a wolf, headfirst, blistering his hands as he holds them like paws, trying to make his muscles bend into new configurations, straining against his human-ness. And it works. You can feel some taut, controlled wildness in how his back arches, how he almost flows as he crawls and howls, body contorted, at the moon; a physical moulding of the binary of human and non-human into something fluid: something both recognisable and deeply, ultimately strange.
But the physical moulding can go further, contorted muscles replaced by a new-born baby with a CGI’d lamb’s head, the strangeness of seeing where soft-white baby wool blends into baby skin, all rolls and tender pink. Lamb (2021), released the same year as Wolf, is somewhere between a domestic drama and a folk tale. Noomi Rapace is one half of a couple living a quiet, near-silent life on their sheep farm in Iceland. Spring is building and we see the blood, guts and tender hope of real sheep giving birth to real lambs, Rapace dragging them out into the world. One of the lambs is different. The farm’s a gorgeous place, using all of that elemental, mythic feeling you get from Iceland. They live in a wide, open valley stretching into skies heavy with banks of fog that flow in and out of the film, filling the valley with a hazy, looser reality. It is a lovely looking film, one you can feel the camera in. There’s not a lot of dialogue, nothing is spelled out. The strangeness works through this, growing in the space given to it by the sparse script. After Ada, the lamb-baby, is first born, there is no talking for a while, there’s very little sound at all. The film sits with the strangeness, lets itself luxuriate in it, lets it slowly percolate into atmosphere.
More than anything, it is a film of faces. The camera stares at María, Rapace’s character, and her husband, Ingvar, but it lingers on all the faces of the farm: the sheep faces, the dog’s, the cat’s. It spends time documenting the expressiveness of the flock, has you really look at them, watch them, their expressions. Morton writes about the building swell of evidence that shows that non-humans can self-reflect, reason, imagine, that they ‘have a sense of beauty and wonder’, and here you can feel the blatant sentience flickering behind the soft-brown eyes. Most expressive of all is Ada’s biological mother. Her and María are battling over their shared child. Sheep-mum stares directly at human-mum, eyes mute and pleading. She sneaks into the house and tries to take Ada back, dragging her down the valley and into the mountains. She baaaa’s up at the bedroom window, screaming at the house, agitated, and alone. María brings this interspecies maternal jealousy to an end. She gets out of bed, walks outside, and shoots the sheep between the eyes. Wearing pyjamas and a rain jacket, she drags her rival by the horns and buries it. It feels brutal, a no-frills gangland hit in the Icelandic valleys.
This shooting echoes back at the end of the film. Ada’s biological father, a hulking, horned ram-man, shoots Ingvar, María’s partner, in the neck and takes their daughter off to the mountains. If you steal my child and shoot my partner, I will do the same to you. It is a kind of violent revenge logic that goes over the species distinction, that blends them together through mirrored emotion and parental ties. Each shooting is built around the same camera shot. In it, María and the ram-dad both have the rifle in their arms and stare down the barrel at the camera. There is such a directness and clarity to the images when you pair them together, two species staring at each other with violence between them.
María shoots the other mother out of a raw, raging frustration at this ewe’s stubbornness, this other mother’s desperation to be with ‘her’ child. This farmed, domesticated animal suddenly upsets the order. It asserts their emotional validity, their ownership of the child, the mute livestock suddenly become expressive parent. Rapace has talked in interviews about how invested she became in María’s mentality, how she tapped into her protectiveness of her own child, and the anger and violent reflexes that would come when they were at risk: ‘It's in those moments I feel like the animal in me just kicks in and I'm not rational anymore. I'm not sophisticated. I'm not verbal.’ Here, emotion echoes emotion, action echoes action.
In her essay On Hospitality, the poet Rebecca Tamás writes about an epiphany a character has when confronted with a cockroach:
‘In the horror of the insect she sees the desperation of everything to live, the thread of being that knits throughout each creature and thing. It is this amoral potency which drives reality, not the structures of affection, elegance and society which she has so far lived by’.
Looking down the barrel, face to face with the sheep mother, what is the dividing line between the two. They are both working according to deep-rooted, emotional directives, two bags of matter dancing to their code. Societal distinctions and hierarchies have been subsumed by something deeper, differences swallowed by these more profound similarities. And once this idea of sentience as separation is taken away, the neatly delineated strata of importance echoing down below us waver, wobble, melt.
This instability, this unresolvability, is what María tries to end with that shooting. It is what the clinic tries to break in those children identifying as animals, what sparks the fascination with feral children and their wild former lives. Normally in film, the strangeness is resolved. The werewolf is shot dead in the alleyway, the traditional way of things slams back into place come the end, smoothing the aberrations out and sealing the strangeness in. But here, they don’t go for neat resolution, they let the strangeness play out. They speak to an ambiguity, a lack of clarity over where the human ends and the non-human begins.
The mites that crawl over me at night have been doing it all my life. Generation after generation has traced the changing contours of my face as age has gradually sculpted it, moulded me. They have followed their programming as I have followed mine, living together, through one another. The world is a tangled cacophony of these kinds of relationships, trillions of ties that dissolve any idea of separation, of distinct strata or hierarchical flow. These films speak to these ideas of indivisibility, of the world being a strange, confused thing, but with something rugged and unifying at its core, some basic propulsion forward, some common, shared strangeness.