Thriller for edification In his early films, Gonzalo Suarez did not look for easy ways: his first feature films (The Strange Case of Dr. Faust and Aum) were a bizarre symbiosis between a psychedelic trip and a surreal parable, later (in Morbo), he appeared as a master of a psychological thriller, confidently following the path laid by Hitchcock. But to follow the trail of the great guru of suspense, the Spaniard got bored very quickly, and a couple of years later he tries to fit the ornate allegories of the instructive story into a tense horror plot, following the tradition of not the British maestro, but the American ancestor of the genre Edgar Poe. It turned out, I must say, not as bright and convincing as before. At least, the audience and critics alike complained that, carried away by the elegance of style and genre games, Suarez at some point lost the threads of the narrative, and with them the opportunity to whip up an atmosphere of anxious expectation, which he so deftly did in Morbo. And for a thriller, the absence of the notorious suspense is like death. Another thing is that positioning “Wolf and Dove” as a traditional thriller would not be entirely correct – except for the convenience of cataloging. Although the presence of Donald Plesens in the title role hints at the genre seemingly unambiguously. And after the exposition and plotting, doubts should not remain even among the most incredulous.
Against the background of the opening credits, two friends find a treasure hidden in a cave on an uninhabited rocky island. One of the men falls asleep with a collapse, the other leaves him in a helpless position and swims away, taking away the golden statuette. But the hero of Pleasance named Martin miraculously escapes, gets to the lonely house of his partner and kills him in front of his young daughter. Years later, Martin is released from prison and returns for the treasure. In the old house lives a strange and unsociable trinity: a husband with his wife and an ugly dwarf that is a woman’s brother. They have no idea of the hidden treasure. But about him probably knows the daughter of the former owner Maria, who after the tragedy was speechless and since then lives in a shelter for the mentally ill. The spouses suddenly wake up family feelings and they take the girl from the House of Sorrow.
Suarez from the first shots twists the intrigue to the limit: after Maria crosses the threshold of her home, a duel of all against all begins. That is, on the screen there is a classic version of “spiders in the jar” – the most cunning, the most dodgy, the most ruthless should win. There are no allies in this battle - each for himself, because his wife has long hated his husband, he hates the vile dwarf, the dwarf hates his sister, and Martin hates all mankind put together. But to get to the treasure, they must portray a close-knit family dedicated to caring for an unfortunate orphan. Intrigues: secret and unprincipled; unions: temporary and false; lies: outright and brazen – all this revolves around a mute girl who becomes the center of a mini-universe. The point at which all this cosmos beyond the walls of the house must sooner or later collapse into a black hole.
With this development of events, the thriller inevitably turns into a parable in which the vicissitudes of the plot at some point go away from the foreground, taking with it the atmosphere of anxious expectation. A lonely dove in a pack of wolves becomes a symbolic figure, and the punishment of gold-hungry predators looks inevitable as the Last Judgment in Christian mythology. Of course, suspense can be found in the Revelation of John – and even what! But with all due respect to Senor Suarez, whose early work left a bright mark on the history of Spanish cinema, the preacher from him turned out not too convincing. In any case, he failed to compensate for the gloomy atmosphere dissolved in philosophy even by fully implementing the old biblical principle of “an eye for an eye.” There were too many truths in all this. And to compete with the Bible in the creation of edifying thrillers is a losing case.
Still, calling The Wolf and the Dove a bad movie would be unfair. If you abstract from genre conventions and look at the picture outside the plot twists and turns, it will be much deeper and more interesting than at first glance. Another thing is that this depth in the framework of the promised thriller turns out to be superfluous - "a horse with a trembling sloth" once again did not harness into one cart. But the attempt was not the most unsuccessful.