Family dysfunction is rooted in news of a pending suicide in Nanouk Leopold’s measured Wolfsbergen: a film seemingly about death, both in its literal and figurative forms, discovers MUBARAK ALI.


QUIETLY announcing its intended pace and tone in the very first image – an extended shot of a withered pine forest penetrated by waning light and the slow-dancing colours of dusk, an opening that vaguely recalls Aleksandr Sokurov’s unforgettable entry into his Spiritual Voices – Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (the Dutch filmmaker’s third feature film) slowly begins to set up a series of moments and micro-events involving a quadri-generational family in the midst of a crisis – a process that would continue until the very last image. As we move through this initially seemingly convoluted network of relationships, we come to know of a letter that has been sent by the hermitic family patriarch, Konraad (Piet Kamerman) to his daughter Maria (Catherine ten Bruggencate) and one of his two granddaughters Sabine (Tamar van Dop), informing them of his planned suicide at the end of that summer. Their own problems eclipse the letter: Maria is coming to terms with her aging body as she becomes emotionally distant from her husband (who is supportive of Konraad’s decision), and Sabine is having an affair with an ex-lover, as her husband falls in love with Sabine’s sensitive sister, Eva, who, it turns out, hasn’t received Konraad’s letter.

This vaguely soap-operatic material is given a highly formal treatment: working with Cinemascope, Leopold frames her characters mostly in static tableaux which unfold in medium- to long-shots; the empty spaces that press upon the characters (be it in a darkened room, or outdoor shots next to a looming forest) married to the film’s distinctive use of long silences and the restrained, zombie-like performances (you’d be forgiven to equate these bodies to the dead trees of the opening shot) an expression of impending death. Indeed, if anything, death is what the film seems to be about, both in its literal and figurative forms.

Leopold’s influences aren’t exactly inconspicuous: the cadence of the images recalls Tsai Ming-liang, the bleakness of personal dysfunctions brings to mind Bergman, the film’s use of light is Vermeer-esque, and Antonioni is evoked in its treatment of landscape and movement. Leopold hardly transcends these influences, but there is something uniquely mesmeric in the way her initially-hermetic images come to reveal their mysteries, as the characters, in their various attempts at (a search for) intimacy, damage existing relationships to create new ones. By the time the entire family comes together to farewell their patriarch in his isolated house by the woods, the film almost becomes melancholic, and, in its final image of death, reaches a plateau which reconciles its fragments of inaction and struggle, abject denial and coming-to-terms, cool distance and unquestioned devotion.