'The Wolfpack' Trailer: 6 Brothers Re-Create Movies in Sundance Documentary Hit
Imagine if everything you knew about the world came from watching movies. That’s more or less how it happened for the Angulo brothers, the subjects of the extraordinary new documentary The Wolfpack. Locked inside a tiny Manhattan apartment for most of their childhood, the six home-schooled boys passed their time obsessively watching Hollywood films. “Sometimes we’d go out once a year; and one particular year, we never got out at all,” one of the brothers explains in the trailer (above). “So movies opened up another world.”
Crystal Moselle’s debut feature, which won prizes at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, explores just how deep this obsession went. Not only do the brothers (now ages 16 to 23) watch hundreds of films and transcribe the scripts by hand, but they stage elaborate re-enactments of favorites like Reservoir Dogs and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Props and sets are built with whatever they can scavenge from their parents’ apartment; the trailer showcases, for example, an impressive re-creation of Christian Bale’s Batman costume from The Dark Knight made from yoga mats and cereal boxes. On the rare occasion when they leave their home, the Angulos can’t help but see the outside world like it, too, is a movie. “This is like 3-D, man!” one of them exclaims, walking through a Manhattan park in a Reservoir Dogs suit.
It was during one of these rare jaunts outside that filmmaker Moselle first encountered the subjects of The Wolfpack, and she documented their lives for nearly five years as the brothers staged their movie re-enactments, went to the beach for the first time, and struggled to break free from their parents’ tight grip. “I don’t think our father knew we had it in us. I guess he always saw us as the little boys who couldn’t,” one brother says in the trailer. “And then we transformed into the boys who can.” The film opens in theaters on June 12.
