by Jason Adams

There is an unfinished quality to the actor George Mackay's face, as if he's a first-draft in putty, not quite defined into full features yet. That quality makes him a perfect fit for Wolf, writer-director Nathalie Biancheri's new film about a young man who believes himself to actually be, under all that pretty pink skin, a you-guessed-it wolf. Mackay naturally seems permanently half fixed, like he's trapped in the middle part in a werewolf  transformation montage -- his impermanence putting this character's indeterminate selfhood right there written over his taut cheekbones.

I wish the rest of Wolf, which sees Mackay's character of Jacob shuffled off to a mad doctor's experimental psychological retreat/prison for, you know, "his own good," worked as well as Mackay does...