Wild Boar
2016 · 13m · Germany
Directed by Bella Szederkényi
Genres: adventure, coming-of-age, fantasy
An animalistic child flees the big city for the dark woods, where it meets a creature mightier than anything imagined.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's *almost* there—a feral kid-meets-mythic-creature setup that could've been Guillermo del Toro cosplay, except Szederkényi commits to the surreal grotesquerie hard enough to make you forget you've seen this premise before, which is rarer than it should be.
The film moves in the tradition of contemporary European art cinema's engagement with folkloric material, though its mythic register sometimes outpaces the compositional clarity that would anchor its formal ambitions.
What sells this is the decision to shoot the creature not as spectacle but as texture—all visceral, unglamorous movement—which forces the child's response (and ours) into genuine disorientation rather than awe, and that single commitment reframes the entire film.