Is This Aussie Film Set in Mongolia a Giant Leap or Just a Small Steppe?

The Wolves Always Come At Night ★★★

While Berlin-based Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady is currently developing her first fully fictional feature, The Wolves Always Come At Night marks her second foray into what she calls “docu-feature”, a hybrid storytelling form that merges observational documentary with elements of fiction, driven by the subjects of the film.

Her first was Island of the Hungry Ghosts , which was set on Christmas Island and used the visually arresting annual migration of land crabs as a metaphor for the journeys of asylum seekers across the world. A counsellor called Poh Lin Lee served as a kind of focal point in that movie, helping give individual human shape to stories of mass movement.

Lee is involved in the new film too, credited as “narrative therapy consultant”. Also returning is Aaron Cupples, whose work on the ethereal land- and windscape-inspired score is just as impressive as it was on the earlier film, and cinematographer Michael Latham, whose images are once again stunning.

Set in Mongolia, The Wolves… focuses on the hard-scrabble existence of goat herder Davaa (Davaasuren Dagvasuren) and his wife Zaya (Otgonzaya Dashzeveg). They are raising four young kids in their ger (circular tent), surrounded by animals and occasionally interacting with neighbours in a far-off community hall, where the conversation revolves around the weather and the birthing of livestock. “How has your spring been?” “Good.” That sort of thing.

The first shot of Davaa is on horseback, riding hard across the Gobi desert on his stocky pony. The film ends with him and his horse together again. But in between, it’s all about the forces that are moving man and beast apart – motorisation, urbanisation, exploitation of the land for minerals, and above all, climate change.

Davaa and Zaya are stoic presences, not given to great slabs of articulation, and not especially expressive. Dagvasuren and Dashzeveg are credited as co-writers here, but I hope they weren’t paid by the word.

To be frank, not a lot happens in The Wolves… If you were feeling mean-spirited, you might say it is exactly the sort of film Marg Downey so brilliantly sent up on Fast Forward 30-plus years ago as “the SBS woman”.

An example, from 1991: “Ahead in the orgy of superior entertainment on SBS tonight we present the next in our series of films by Turkish director Yilmaz Hobeglu. Kemal and the Weevil tells the heartbreaking story of a boy who befriends an orphaned weevil only to have it cruelly snatched from him by the secret police.”

The Wolves… has grander aspirations than that, to be sure. It follows Davaa as he watches over his goats, helps them give birth to their kids, loads their corpses into his flat-bed truck after a sandstorm wipes out half the flock, sells his beloved stallion to help make ends meet, moves the family to the city, and takes a job as an excavator driver at a quarry. They are monumental shifts in a life, but the hands-off approach to scripting means their dramatic import isn’t always conveyed as fully as it might have been.

Brady lived in Mongolia years ago, and her embrace of this form of hybrid storytelling is clearly designed to afford agency to its subjects, for whom she has palpable empathy. It makes for some beautiful images, some subtly moving moments, and a patina of truth.

That’s all to be applauded. I just wish there was a little more connective tissue on those narrative bones.

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