 Day 23, the Wolf House, suggested by several people several times, but most successfully three days ago by Max Max when it was seconded by 19 people. It's interesting to think about the Wolf House as a descendant of triumph of the will. Lenny Riefenstahl's work is perhaps the most famous propaganda film of all time, and it was intended to convince the world of the rightness and power of the Third Reich. Generally speaking, the second part worked. The way that we think of Nazis is largely a result of works like hers. I've seen some of it. It's not a particularly interesting movie, but it's unquestionably an impressive one. Dan Olson, aka Folding Ideas, made an excellent video on the cinematic language of propaganda that I recommend, literally everything he's ever made, if you want more on that. The Wolf House is not a real propaganda film, but it bills itself as one. We are ever so briefly introduced to a group modeled after the real La Colonia Dignidad, a German enclave in Chile, where ex-Nazis fled and subsequently did some truly heinous shit alternately sanctioned by and literally for the Chilean government. As you might expect, of a group of ex-Nazis and a fascist dictator. But the narrator promises that all of those dark stories we've heard are lies, rumors started by those afraid of a community that wants to be isolated and pure. This film is intended to help those people understand the Colony that is very funny, and it is the only thing about this movie that's funny. The Wolf House is a fairy tale of sorts about a beautiful blonde woman named Maria who leaves the Colony and finds herself alone in a house with two pigs who she raises to be beautiful blonde children named Ana and Pedro. But of course, there is a wolf lurking, a man constantly calling out to Maria, a reflection of the place she has left and the fact that she has never truly gone from it. She can't really escape. He may not know where she is, but he can still see her. All of this is rendered in one of the most unique and frankly unsettling visual styles I've ever seen, though it's not really one style at all. Those Cristobal León and Joaquin Cosinha made this film over five years, largely creating it in museums where they built spaces that interested patrons could come visit and see the process. They followed a series of ten rules that they kept with them through the production. Some rules were technical in nature, all painting had to be done in front of the camera. There are no puppets in the traditional stop motion sense, and the camera can never be static. Others were bigger picture. It has to be a normal movie, which is to say have a linear narrative. And the project is not being made on a set, but in a workshop. Where your typical stop motion film uses small scale models invisibly manipulated in a way that makes it feel like a normal movie, the wolf house emphasizes its artifice. Heck, even calling it stop motion doesn't feel right. It's more like a cinematic time lapse. You can see the construction of each piece, first in paint, then in sculpture. Nothing just pops into existence. While you never see León and Cosinha, meaning they aren't literally just like setting up a time lapse on the camera, it does give that impression. The paint moves and shifts. It covers not just the walls and the floors, but any physical objects in the room. Is there a television in the way of one of the characters moving across a wall? Well, now they're painted on top of that television. It lends a sense of depth and physicality to the otherwise two-dimensional medium that feels very visceral and frankly rather unpleasant. I did not enjoy the act of watching the wolf house. I didn't like seeing people form in different ways, how when a sculpture's body moves it can tear the limbs, creating gaps that will be filled in over the next few frames. The soundscape is often production itself. If the figures can't hold themselves up, you see the string or pieces of tape that keep them in place, ensuring you never forget that you're watching someone's creation and really their creative process. But just as the people who may have watched me write this review eventually got bored of it, the amount of detail that we see in the wolf house eventually becomes kind of exhausting. I started watching the movie around 8pm and immediately after it ended, I went to sleep. It's one of only a couple of times I've been in bed before midnight since starting this month of reviews and definitely the first time I was asleep before 10. I did appreciate how it kept mutating as the film progressed though. New art styles and different physical mediums ensure that you aren't just watching the same few figures form over and over again, but eventually I kind of wished it would play back at 1.5 or 2 times speed. Then again, doing that would absolutely diminish the effect. That deliberate slowness is what makes the wolf house's atmosphere so fucking impressive, claustrophobic, really you feel genuinely trapped by the experience in the same way that Maria is. And that's where the propaganda lies. This is not a film that makes La Colonia look good, but one that makes the outside world look evil. A fairy tale you tell children who might consider leaving, convincing them that it's better to stay with the devil you know than take your chance with one you don't. And I think it would work. 8.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Cameron Marco, Kat Saracata, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I'm the Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Clare Bear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, it's great, if not, oh well, if you want to see more, tell me what to review in 3 days down there, we're almost through it.