by Finnlay Dall
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Davaasuren Dagvasuren, Otgonzaya Dashzeveg
Intro:
… a heart wrenching tale of a father and his family facing the results of climate catastrophe.
In a small-town hall bordering the Gobi Desert, several Mongolian farmers discuss how conditions have worsened in the area. Before the meeting begins, an older man asks our hero Davaasuren Dagvasuren and another farmer if either of them have seen the Two Red Stars that have begun to merge in the sky:
“One of those stars comes out each month… One is called ‘The Gluttonous Hag’ and if it’s seen, the spring is very harsh.”
Barely surviving on a previous year’s grass harvest for their livestock, desertification has become a serious problem within the community.
When we first meet Daava and his family, they live a fairly simple and carefree life herding goats. Compared to others, Daava seems to want for nothing except to continue taking care of his children, his wife Otgonzaya and his many goats and horses. But when a sandstorm — one so severe that neither he or his wife have seen anything like it – ravages their lands and kills “half the herd” of goats – the family are forced to sell their remaining livestock and migrate to the city in hopes of finding work.
Like her previous film, Island of the Hungry Ghosts, Gabrielle Brady uses a hybrid documentary form to recreate Davaa and his family’s traumatic experience, expressing the pain of the innocent people who are left behind to pay for our endless greed and consumption.
The title The Wolves Always Come at Night refers to Mongolian farmers and their worry about predators on their doorstep. But how can one herder shoo away an entire fleet of foreign industrialists, oil execs and lobbyists from changing the very weather in his own backyard and starving his animals to death; especially when all he has is a torch and the clothes on his back?
Un-shy in its bleakness, the film is made all the more sad by Davaa himself, whose outward love for the people and animals around him is on constant display throughout the film. He’s a doting father to his kids, often getting them excited for and involving them in his work. But it’s not just his kids that he tends to with a kind heart and gentle hands. Davaa personally delivers the kids of his herd. However, unlike the Western farmers who are quick to separate a mum from her young, Davaa lets the mothers of his herd tend to their newborns – often helping the infant imprint on the smell of its mother’s fur. A reserved man with a bleeding heart for the creatures and people around him, his plight at the hands of climate change not only seems unfair but uniquely cruel.
In a matter of days after the inciting incident, we’re forced to watch as a man has to tell his kids to say goodbye to their grandparents and cousins, who they’ve known all their lives. Particularly heartbreaking is the selling of his prized stallion to a complete stranger, as the horse thrashes about and becomes aggressive at the thought of being let go from the one person they’ve bonded with. But none of this is met with screams of anguish or tears by the family. Instead, they spend the long car trip in silent grief, knowing that they may never come back.
What’s more, the noise of the city is a jolt awake compared to the tranquil silence of the mountains. Gone are the bleats of goats and whinnies of horses. In their stead come the creaks and rumble of steel and gravel. And Davaa’s youngest kids, once filling the air with mirth and laughter, now scream at the realisation that their dad has to go to work. The noise is just as internal as external for Davaa, who now doubts his own self-worth before his new life has even begun. He reaches breaking point when a community official asks him the reason for the family’s move to their dilapidated city.
Digging out a literal shit-hole, he comes to a stark conclusion: “I realised that when you lose your animals you wonder, what’s the point of calling yourself a herder?”
Davaa’s story is not unusual in Mongolia. Many people from the countryside have been forced to flee for fear of an ever worsening landscape, and many more will follow. As their neighbours tell Otgonzaya, the town didn’t even exist eight years ago, but now people from the country come in droves; they themselves being forced to leave in a similar fashion after a winter snowstorm in 2002. And at their age, we’re left with the horrid knowledge that the old couple, or even Davaa’s own family might never make it back to their homeland.
Brady gives her final scenes a touch of magical realism, as Davaa is plagued with dreams of horse herds coming down city streets or whinnying into the night air. It’s here where the wall of candidacy breaks completely into fiction and metaphor, as horses gallop down gravel roads in gorgeously rendered slow-mo. However, while these picturesque scenes are indeed worth destroying our suspension of disbelief for, the other fictional liberties the director has taken to retell Davaa’s story are somewhat distasteful.
It may surprise many to learn for example that Davaa’s encounter with his dead herd was staged after the fact. Most of the early portions of the film are recreations for the benefit of the audience. So, despite being agreed upon by Davaa himself, it’s difficult not to feel a little uneasy when a man is forced to relive his trauma, as he slowly and silently hauls (thankfully fake) goat carcasses onto a truck. It’s the film’s autofictional nature (which you would only know about from Q&As Brady has given herself) which sours the film’s pathos. None of which is any of Davaa’s fault. As the filmmakers and Davaa have made quite clear, the events of the film did happen. But when you have yet another high-profile documentary filmmaker who – unsatisfied with committing to one form or the other – decides to haphazardly blend fact and fiction, Wolves Come at Night unnecessarily weakens its message and cheapens a real family’s otherwise heartbreaking story.
Every documentary has some level of artifice. After all, part of the fun of films like My First Film or Spermworld is how fantastical the filmmakers make the world around us. But Wolves Come at Night doesn’t let audiences in on what’s believable and what’s not, turning what should be a bittersweet ending, into the arthouse equivalent of a home improvement reality show – exploiting a real family’s grief and then sending them away on the horse they rode in on.
The Wolves Come at Night is a heart wrenching tale of a father and his family facing the results of climate catastrophe. Equal parts urgent as it is bleak thanks to the kind soul that is Davaa, we’re given hope in the world known for all its horrors. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers who decided to poach his story for awards and recognition, didn’t stop to question whether they were doing the right thing.
