17/10/2023 - Pau Calpe Rufat’s sophomore feature adapts a Catalan novel into an accomplished work of transformation and resistance

Adrià (León Martínez) is a teenager without a home; he’s mute and an orphan, can’t stand enclosed spaces, is always hunched over and often gets bullied. His wandering gaze feels unsettling the second it falls on you, but it darts away the next. Impermanence seems to follow him wherever he goes, and so does trouble, too, especially when there’s a full moon. Adrià is the protagonist of producer-turned-director Pau Calpe Rufat’s sophomore feature, Werewolf [+see also:
interview: Pau Calpe Rufat
film profile], which had its world premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival, in the International Competition. The follow-up to his 2021 debut, A Piece of Land, is an atmospheric psychological drama that draws on folklore and the social realities of marginalised, nomadic lifestyles in the Spanish countryside.

Calpe Rufat and co-writer Nati Escobar Gutiérrez adapt the Catalan novel Lobisón by Ginés Sánchez into a rather contained, unconventional lycanthrope story. Werewolf is not as straightforward in its storytelling as the title might suggest. On the contrary, the film opts for realism and shrouds the potential transformation in mystery: indeed, Adrià feels a thirst for the blood of chickens at night, but his inarticulate existence and fragile sense of self clash with the traditional figure of the werewolf that one is led to expect. Without the subtle – and outright unnerving – performance of León Martínez, the film would have teetered on parody. In fact, it walks a tightrope between genre and social realism, but it does so impressively well.

Meticulously edited by Ares Botanch and shot by Víctor Entrecanales with crispness and sensitivity, Werewolf is a haunting film that empathises with the other in both its visual style and its narrative content. Adrià’s older brother Ramon (Pol López) and his girlfriend Tona (Maria Rodríguez Soto) live in a van, moving from village to village, where he makes money from petty theft and schemes. The three of them don’t really play house, since Adrià sleeps outside on a mattress with no covers or pillows, eating a muffin or two a day served in the same bowl, as if he were even more of a pet than their small rescue dog. Apart from representing a fluid anti-nuclear family structure, there’s a critique of masculinity as we know it, which is reinforced by the novel’s premise – revealed in gritty flashbacks – where the seventh son (Adrià) is a werewolf. Folk tales, myths and patriarchal norms intermingle in the film’s subplot, which is best left for viewers to discover by themselves.

Whether it be a metaphor for those who are different when it comes to bodies, identities or disabilities, or an unconventional look at people on the fringes of society resisting normative structures, Werewolf affords its characters respect and doubt in equal measure. Such openness testifies to the director’s humanist sensibilities and even hints at the possibility of transcending what we think “human” is, when the dichotomy of nature versus nurture is stripped away.

Werewolf is a Spanish production by Galápagos Media, DACSA Produccions SL and TV3.