catastrophe has struck Europe, causing drastic shortages of food and water everywhere. Fleeing the city for the country, where they think they might be better able to weather the storm, Anna (Huppert) and her family arrive at their small house in the woods only to find it occupied by others. A conflict ensues, and suddenly Anna's husband is dead and she's been driven off of her own property, left to fend for herself and her two children, Eva (Demoustier) and Ben (Biscombe), alone and with very few supplies.
After days spent roaming the villages and fields of the countryside for food and shelter, Ben goes missing in the middle of the night. He appears the following morning, but as the captive of a desperate-looking teenage boy (Taleb). After some coaxing, Anna and Eva convince the boy to release Ben and stay with them, for survival's sake.
The boy tells Anna and her children about a train that's been running in the area, and the word is that it has supplies on it. An hours-long trek ensues, but the four finally find train tracks. Eventually a train comes, but it doesn't stop for them, despite their cries.
The tracks do finally lead the four to a station, however, and there they find not only shelter but other people—several families who are staying at the station in the hope that a train will stop there in the near future. Anna and her children decide to stay, but the boy does not. Life in this place is one of strict rules, rules designed for survival, rules that the teenager can't bring himself to live by.
With time, even more people arrive at the station, which means more companionship and supplies, but also means that the tensions and dangers of living in such desperate conditions are that much greater. Who knows how long they will all have to live like this—or if there's even any end in sight?
Extraordinarily devastating
Though it shares a number of elements with other, more mainstream apocalyptic disaster films, Time of the Wolf is a very different creature. Its intensely dire tone and brutally realistic exposition give it more psychological impact than any computer-generated tidal wave.
Its plot is relatively simplistic, but this just highlights the crushing banality of what survival on a day-to-day basis means in an environment of severe lack. Where Time of the Wolf expends much of its energy is in depicting the difficulties and brutalities of traumatic loss and of living with other—often intensely fallible—human beings in desperate times.
Nearly all the acting in this film is near-perfect, but the performances of the young Demoustier and even younger Biscombe are particularly devastating. The film's cinematography is sparse and striking, like the countryside in which its story is set. Time of the Wolf is beautiful to look at and terrible to behold.
In Norse mythology, the "Time of the Wolf" is the period just before Ragnarok, the battle between gods and monsters that will bring about the end of the world. Haneke infuses his film with an uncannily charged apocalyptic feeling, in which more-than-eerily-quiet landscapes are shot through with the cries of humans' suffering and with the dynamic energy of the human struggle for survival.
As science fiction, Time of the Wolf succeeds in (cryptically) creating a terribly convincing what-if scenario that, as all good SF does, compels its audience to think about not only the world of the future (near or far), but the here and now. One of the true horrors and great accomplishments of this movie is the fact that its depictions of displaced people trying against the odds to stay alive is in all likelihood not that far from reality.
