CUB

Sam, a rather closed and taciturn twelve-year-old, goes camping with his scout group. Due to a misunderstanding, the cubs and their three leaders find themselves in a dark forest that actually hides some sinister secrets, to the point that the story about a supposed werewolf roaming the area, told by the older ones to the kids as a joke, seems to take on terrifyingly real connotations. Sam will find himself involved in a series of encounters with this dark presence up to unexpected consequences. If there’s something that often succeeds in the Flemish area, it’s horror. And when talking about Cub, you can’t help but look at the origins of this feature film, a delightful surprise straight from Belgium whose suggestive power can finally be enjoyed even in home edition. A promising debut by young Jonas Govaerts that aims not so much to astonish the viewer, but to instill in the mind of the general public the right seeds for reflection. No to teen-romance horror atmospheres, no to the classic waste of red paint in splatter style: everything the director uses to guide the narrative is a forest, a cinematic topos for the genre, but this time it comes to life with dark, concrete presences. Among the dense vegetation, an impressive tragedy unfolds because it is far too realistic, yet the doubt about the actual boundary between reality and imagination remains well present. Since always in the literary tradition, the forest acts as a metaphor for the human unconscious, a smoky cauldron in which the most brutal and primordial instincts are remixed, and Govaerts’ location does not deviate in revealing within it irrational impulses mixed with actual traps set by the villain of the moment (in a curious and tenuous reference to the fabled The Cabin in the Woods). The childish echo with a violent or grotesque flavor of films such as Friday the 13th and Pan’s Labyrinth softens into an amalgam of news fact and a dreamlike episode, completely distant from any happy ending parable. The story of the child-werewolf is a tale made up to scare the little ones, and the statements of the protagonist seem to be the fruit of a rather developed imagination, but one holds their breath when the frail and deformed creature clearly appears on screen: a new god Pan covered in mud, complete with a horned mask made of rough bark and guttural sounds emitted from time to time from the livid lips. Nothing supernatural, then, but the evil that spreads among huge trunks and little-trodden paths is inseparable from humanity itself. Sam, whose past is shrouded in a skillful aura of mystery, is the only one to recognize it and approach it, because it is already part of him. The discomfort of the young protagonist intertwines with other themes that permeate the unfolding of the story, such as strong criticism of current society represented by the ghostly abandoned factory, an emblem of a crisis that soon involves the entire group of cubs for which one cannot fail to refer to an aura of literariness given by the similarity with the instances present in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The dynamics of relationships between the children, however, appear adapted to contemporaneity, forced into an outlook that transcends any formula of goodism to refer to the savage and unmotivated cruelty. In fact, the narrative structure lacks cohesion and some points not well clarified by the screenplay induce the viewer to ask too many questions—left, alas, unanswered—but Cub is a film to be watched as it is presented, without pretensions of complete understanding or expectations that fall within the standards. The discomfort of Sam and his consequent problematic approach with Kai are substantially the core around which the actions of the other characters revolve, who respond a bit sadly to stereotypes retreaded in the culture of the genre, and even the internal tension within the group becomes functional to spotlight the protagonist’s impulses, adolescent stimuli that lead him to free himself from repression and attempt individual redemption from an existence painted in dark tones only by the few words of the two group leaders scattered here and there during the events. If for the first hour this lean film seems to work properly, in the second part something not well identifiable gets stuck in the narrative mechanism: it will be the nocturnal dimension aimed at highlighting the darker half of the nightmare, it will be the crudeness of the subsequent events, but the film strips itself of its alleged allegorical and psychological ambitions in favor of a somewhat artificial tension that indulges in some horror clichés while still delivering more than a few effective moments, up to the most extreme closing of the circle. Despite the accumulation of clues—consciously deviant and often left without any explanation—a bloody story without a specified motive cannot but cause perplexity. Probably, the dramatic peaks and the ferocious plot twist at the end would have needed more development and attention, but in any case, the request remains a careful analysis that must not languish in the superficial. Of course, Govaerts’ baptism of fire earns a prominent place in the national and European author panorama, thanks also to a splendid dark photography that highlights the forest setting, a soundtrack with agitated tones totally adequate to the context, and the performances of the actors, first and foremost the very young Maurice Luijten who plays the leading role of the film with a good dose of spontaneity and mastery, demonstrating a versatility at times unusual for an adolescent of his age. In conclusion, Cub does not emerge as a milestone of the genre, but it remains a valid product that stands as a bold experiment in moving away from the usual schemes of instant thrills to chase the fascinating sparks of the oneiric-suggestive.