Female shape-shifters in the movies tend to be
highly sexualized, like Nastassia Kinski in the Cat People remake or Sybil Danning in Howling II. In contrast, Marie is pretty repressed, but she is a
product of her coastal Danish environment. You could easily imagine John Calvin
preaching in their wooden church. However, she will undergo some dramatic
changes in Jonas Alexander Arnby’s When
Animals Dream (trailer here),
which opens this Friday in New York.
As the film opens, Marie is rather concerned
about a persistent rash and strange tufts of hair growing in places where they
shouldn’t be. Her elevated stress level will not help. She has just started
work at a fish cannery, which is even less glamorous than it sounds. She makes
fast-friends with a couple of the cool kids, including Daniel, who might even be
potential boyfriend material. Unfortunately, she also quickly finds herself on
the wrong end of the sexual harassing “pranks” of the sociopathic Esben and his
cronies.
Frankly, the entire village is rather
standoffish towards Marie. They fear she will turn out to be her mother’s
daughter. For some time, her father has kept her formerly wild and beautiful
mother zoned out on tranquilizers and anti-psychotic medication. Of course,
when her werewolf nature starts to assert itself, the village doctor inevitably
prescribes the same treatment for her, with her father’s acquiescence.
WAD is a wildly moody, thoroughly hypnotic, revisionist feminist take
on lycanthropy. There will be plenty of painful deaths down the stretch, but it
is more a riff on the mad-woman-in-the-attic trope than an exercise in gore. Nevertheless,
when the film gets down to snarling business, it is unabashedly cathartic.
Lycanthropy as feminist survival strategy is
all very good, but it is Sonia Suhl who really sells it as Marie. Beautiful,
but in a freakishly ethereal way, Suhl’s very presence is unquantifiabaly disconcerting.
Yet, she still gives an impressively real performance in her feature debut, viscerally
expressing all of Marie’s social awkwardness and pent-up resentment. It is her
movie, but the other Mikkelsen (Mads’ brother Lars) adds further layers of
anguished ambiguity as Marie’s father, Thor, who will slowly strangle his loved
ones to ostensibly save them from the potential mob with pitchforks that constitute
their village.
