Wildcat Review: The Tenderness Factor Is at The Highest Levels
Stars: Dante Cueva Altamirano, Cristian De La Cruz, Erick Scott Vargas Laura
Directors: Trevor Frost, Melissa Lesh
Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Wildcat is the Amazon Original documentary film that brings an exciting journey to the Amazon to the screen. Directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, the docu-film has a duration of approximately one hour and forty-five minutes and is produced by Alysa Nahmias and Joshua Altman. Wildcat will be available exclusively on Prime Video worldwide.
Known above all for its production of original series, the Amazon Prime Video platform also boasts a fair sample of documentaries, and it is with one of these that it has decided to close – for the public to decide whether it is beautiful or not – 2022, and it is that film we talk about in our Wildcat review.
Wildcat Review: The Story Plot
The film follows the story of Harry Turner, a British soldier who returned from Afghanistan with traumas so serious that he wanted to take his own life. For this purpose, he went to the Amazon Forest in Peru, except to reconsider after making the acquaintance of Samantha Zwicker, a scientist who specializes in the care of local carnivores. Through her Harry has gradually regained the will to live, especially after he has been entrusted with a very important task: to closely follow the development of Keanu, an ocelot cub, waiting for him to be set free in the Peruvian flora. A strong emotional relationship is born between the two, so intense as to have an unexpected consequence: what if the separation from the puppy negatively affects the boy’s mental health?
Wildcat Review and Analysis
Wildcat is not the first ecological documentary to focus on similar issues, but the decision to tell the subject by focusing on the tenderness factor through the friendship between man and the ocelot is undoubtedly effective, an unlikely four-legged appearance which, despite trying to limit hunting and buying and selling, still today it can serve as a pet (Salvador Dalí is famous for having had one at home, passing it off as a normal cat when he took it with him to a restaurant).
And from that point of view, it is natural to wonder about Amazon’s production/distribution participation, which between a not-exactly-optimal communication strategy and a frustrating interface for the platform to say the least will probably struggle to reach the film’s ideal audience, which in the United States United will have had better luck finding it in theaters (the film was released at the cinema to be eligible in the Oscar area).
But even once you find the film in the Prime Video catalog, the question remains about how powerful it is in getting its message across. Indeed, his messages, because on paper he has two: the discourse of the conservation of the Amazon on the one hand, and that of the mental health of the soldiers on the other. And if the first lead is explored with precision, marking the emotional evolution of the film with the growth stages of Keanu, who is truly disarmingly tender (and one who has always preferred dogs to cats tells you this), the second instead is just hinted at, brought up almost at random, with a superficial approach that makes the initial disclaimer a little strange although it is considered necessary in the light of modern sensibilities on the presence of the theme of suicide in the feature film.
And the human factor is partially missing, a somewhat paradoxical result since the camera is almost always at Harry’s height, to show his positive evolution. An evolution that, however, becomes incomplete and highlights the overly constructed and artificial quality of a documentary that will appeal to animal rights activists but otherwise risks sinking into the usual platform anonymity. The tenderness factor is at the highest levels, but the dramaturgical construction falters due to the imbalance between the two narrative lines that the documentary would like to explore.
