A woman tells three criminals a story.
WOLVES is used with permission from Jesus Celaya. Learn more at / jesuscelaya_08 .
Three criminals are laying low at a local cantina, wiling away the time by drinking. A mysterious old woman enters the bar, approaching the group. Thinking she is begging for money, the criminals offer a deal to the woman: tell a story in exchange for a valuable coin that they say can tell the future.
The old woman weaves a tale of a wild, rebellious young woman that bonds with a pack of wolves. Chafing at the protectiveness of her mother, the young woman longs to be as free as the wolves, who prove treacherous. As the old woman tells her tale, at times even getting lost in her own emotion, the criminals realize that the old woman may not be as she seems -- and that fate may just have caught up with them.
Written and directed by Jesus Celaya, this short drama has both the high-stakes pulse and grandeur of the Western genre, with its slow burn of confrontation and its moral elasticity. It also has the elemental metaphysical pull of the supernatural and fantastical in the storytelling, hinted at with grace notes of special effects. Both strands are deftly braided together with a hypnotic atmosphere and a stylish, self-assured visual sense, weaving a tale of revenge, evil and the transformative powers of maternal love and rage.
The narrative is essentially a story within a story, setting up the film with a classic riff on an archetypal Western trope of an outsider entering town. And like an archetypal Western, it's rendered with moody, almost lurid lighting and a style that emphasizes the buildup of tension and showdown. Performances by actor Armando Rivera as the leader of the criminals and actor Graciela Patino also fall into the heightened, stylized universe of the film, evoking not psychological specificity but archetypal power.
And when challenged to tell a story, the old woman pulls together a wilder, almost epic tale of a young woman drawn to danger, at odds with her mother and falling prey to a seductive group of predators. The visual language transforms, too, becoming more poetic, restless and swooping, like a spirit in the desert. It evokes the spectral presence of these supernatural wolves, which ravage and brutalizes the young woman and pulls her mother into madness.
Eventually, the Western and the fantasy merge in WOLVES, which tucks away a powerful myth within its Western stylings. When faced with the rage and righteousness of a bereft mother, even the most malevolent force of the underworld cowers before such a force of nature. And though we may not see the eventual fate of the cantina criminals, we already know it, foretold as it was in a tale that is as much prophecy as it is folklore.