The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo)

  When I was a kid I used to watch a show that would put on all sorts of eastern European animation shorts. Czech madman Jan Švankmajer was a constant fixture, of course, but they had all sorts of crazily creative, obsessively realised nightmare fuel. One short, which I retroactively identified as an adaptation of Maupassant's The Horla many years later upon reading it, kept me terrified well into adulthood.

 Chilean film The Wolf House would have fit right in that show. It kicks off with a prologue where some narration over archival footage explains that this is a sort of cultural outreach program from an isolated German colony somewhere in Chile, one that despite their protestations seems distinctly cultish. They offer a film from their archives, an incredibly creepy artifact to convince everyone that they aren't creepy at all.

 The film is, of course, The Wolf House. It's a cautionary tale about a girl, Maria (voice: Amalia Kassai), who ran away from the Colony because she wanted to play with her pigs and not work. She escapes through a dark forest, evading a Wolf (Rainer Krause) who keeps taunting her, and finds refuge in a small house where she decides to raise the two pigs she finds as humans.
 That's going to be most of the movie: a dark, surrealist cautionary fable that follows Maria and her new family as they try to build a life in isolation under the constant disapproving gaze of the Wolf, who acts as the point of view of the commune- a deeply troubling, paternalistic presence throughout the film.

Maria, in the process of entering the scene.

 It is almost staggeringly beautiful, in a very ugly way. Cameras effortlessly maneuver through rooms as the story is animated through stop-motion painting on the walls, which sometimes morph into 3D models that sprout out of the walls or floor with a disturbingly organic layering that ends up turning into human bodies (think of a non-biological, papier-maché version of Frank's resurrection in Hellraiser). There's never a cut to a finished model, they're always built before our eyes, accruing layers of cardboard, paper and fabric gubbins until they are wrapped up in first skin, then clothing.

 The characters are crude, but that just adds to the film's ambiance, and the amount of work and care that's clearly gone into every scene in this movie is astounding - that's part and parcel of stop motion animation, but the homemade quality here is really something else. Directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, along with Natalia Geisse, have done an incredible job here.

 The family Maria creates is at first dark haired and dark eyed, but after an accident, they're recreated 'better' with blonde hair and blue eyes - and later are shown wearing lederhosen. Given all the German accents and a few other details, it's not hard to realize what the subtext is here. That's before you read about Chile's Colonia Dignidad, a Pinochet-era compound that was run by a bona fide Nazi; I had actually known about that, but didn't make the connection until after watching the movie and reading up on it online, since I was looking at it more from a cult perspective.
 So... yeah, fun. It works as a fucked-up fable, and gains a whole other load of nastiness from its metatextual elements. It's willfully weird and creepy as hell, but if this sort of madness appeals at all, I'd say it's pretty essential watching.