Reading the Cryptozoology literature, you will inevitably come across the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal that purportedly slaughtered up to a hundred people (or maybe even hundreds, the record isn’t entirely clear) over three years in 1760s France. After numerous hunts and false victories, the killings finally ended after a particularly large wolf was shot, stuffed, and mounted in King Louis XV’s court. The larger-than-life descriptions of the beast given by surviving victims and hunters and fuzzy historical records has led to endless speculation about just what kind of animal the beast really was (it’s even become a common reference for werewolf stories)—and while the consensus, for the most part, is that the deaths were the work of a wolf, or more likely several wolves, the French production The Brotherhood of the Wolf asks the provocative question “what if it wasn’t a wolf, what if it was, like…a different animal?” It also asks another equally provocative question, which is whether this piece of French history could not be made into an epic-length martial arts action movie.
Directed and co-written by Christophe Gans, Brotherhood goes all in on the late nineties/early millennial excess inspired by The Matrix, finding ample opportunity for sweeping vistas, stylish camera placement, copious slow motion, and creative scene transitions (they wipe from a naked woman’s body to snow-capped mountains, which is something I thought only happened in parodies.) The goal is to look cool above all else, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that French filmmakers were as enamoured with that as everyone else was at the time. Applying that aesthetic to European historical fiction is certainly a bold proposal—at least flowing coats were as popular in eighteenth-century France as they were at the turn of the millennium.
The plot follows royal naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac (French actor Samuel le Bihan), who has been sent to Gévaudan to assist the investigation and eventual destruction of the beast that has been plaguing the region for years, accompanied by his best friend Mani, an Iroquois from New France. Mani is an Indigenous character straight out of Last of the Mohicans, a man of few words and a spiritual connection to nature, especially wolves, and also inexplicably a master of martial arts—well, the actual explanation is that he is portrayed by martial artist Mark Decascos, who seems to be going through a bit of a career renaissance in recent years due to his role in the third John Wick movie. It is certainly a choice to have an Iroquois portrayed by a Hawaiian actor of mixed descent (at least it’s not as distracting as Armand Assante playing a Native American in Prophecy), but I guess they needed someone who was good at kicking people—and Mani certainly kicks a lot of people what good.
The first half of the movie (theoretically) stays within the realm of the historical record, including some of the actual players in the story (like the incompetent Captain Duhamel), but also contains many moments where random people pick fights with Mani, and then proceed in the traditional martial arts movie form to attack him one by one and then get knocked into the dirt—this, in fact, one of the first things we see happen, before we are even formally introduced to our heroes. Despite consisting of what looks to be mostly lower class Frenchmen, they do at least come equipped with fighting gimmicks and weapons like steel claws, which I assume must also be historically accurate. Fronsac and Mani spend their rest of their time among the region’s gentry, with the Marquis D’Apcher becoming their most devoted ally, and Fronsac falling for the spunky daughter of the Morangias family. Investigating the bodies of the victims of the beast—all of them either young women or children—Fronsac comes to the conclusion that the thing is no mere wolf, as all the other hunters assume (shades of Jaws in this, although there are shades of Jaws in the actual historical event), but something much larger and equipped with iron fangs. We see some of the beast’s attacks at various points in the movie, all involving lone peasant women out in the middle of the gray and foreboding French wilderness, and all with with the monster off-screen and performing some impressive mauling (although the historical detail that most of the victims had their throats torn out is not included—not maximalist enough for this movie.) Our first real glimpse comes halfway through, in a story provided by a young girl who escaped it by hiding in a rabbit hole (and only lives to tell it because of Mani’s special healing powder), but that first look is so bizarre that you might be as skeptical as the other hunters
This movie’s vision of the beast is, as revealed later, unorthodox—it’s actually a lion decked out in spiky armour pulled straight from a heavy metal album cover or a 2001-era teenagers’ trapper keeper, raised from its birth in an environment of cruelty and violence (we see it partake in numerous dog fights) to become a perfect killing machine. As silly as that sounds, it’s not too far removed from some of the actual “theories” about the real beast, such as it being a Spotted Hyena. You mostly see it as a CGI creation, but with close-ups using very lifelike puppets provided by the Henson Creature Workshop—the computer effects are fairly cartoony at times, and bear the desaturated look of SFX resigned to swift obsolescence, as most late nineties/early two-thousands CG does. The effects also emphasize not only how unexpectedly agile the beast is, but also its completely ridiculous tendency to sneak up on people—all the time!—despite being a lion wearing a heavy suit of armour. If you can’t hear that when it’s right behind you, maybe you deserve to be mauled.
In any case, that information is swiftly swept under the rug by the King’s weapons master (a figure credited with killing the beast in 1767), who shoots a random wolf and coerces Fronsac into using his expert taxidermy skills (he’s also good at drawing portraits in a style that looks more like modern comic book art) to turn it into a fitting monster, the one that is eventually shown in Louis’ court. Despite both knowing that this is a fraud, the weapons master’s orders come down from the King himself, who simply wants an end to the matter without any unfortunate revelations being dredged up—the narrator tells us that real history ends there, and the rest of the movie tells us a different version. Thematically, this turn has some interesting potential—we are never endeared to most of the noble class in Gévaudan (simultaneously decadent, frivolous, and sanctimonious), who seem either incapable or entirely blase about this horrific series of events visited entirely on the lower classes, and this attempt to essentially cover up the problem without solving it because it may prove inconvenient to the rulers is one final bow on it. The idea, it would seem here, is that a monster is the problem of the poor, poorly handled by their amoral social superiors—that the narrative framing device is the Marquis, decades later, writing these things down just before he is to be taken to the guillotine during the French Revolution, would make it even more appropriate. However, the peasants play little to no part for most of the story (unless you count the dingy barbarians who act as the villainous henchmen), and by the second half it is mostly a conflict between different factions of la noblesse française.
The plots eventually becomes a little over-complicated, involving a religious conspiracy instigated by a rogue group led by local priest Father Sardis (we are told he was “driven insane by the Enlightenment”) who plan to undermine Louis XV by manufacturing an apocalyptic “monster” and then forcing him to return France to a Christianity-dominated order (he even writes and distributes a book about it, just like every maniac to this very day.) They are opposed by spies sent by Rome, headed by a courtesan at the local brothel played by international superstar Monica Bellucci, who ultimately work with Fronsac and Mani to eliminate the so-called “Wolves of God.” This also involves the brother of Fronsac’s love interest, a pale and creepy fellow who goes from having vaguely incestuous feelings for his sister to outright stating his incestuous feelings as being his primary motivation before doing some real nasty business (you understand while they feel need to kill him in a fight and then have Bellucci stab his corpse for good measure.) After Mani is killed, Fronsac goes from non-participant in the action to war-painted ninja assassin in short order, and his fight with the brother even involves a chain sword like the one Ivy uses in Soulcalibur. No matter how the movie tries to tell me that this is commenting on how people react to “changing times” (with the “libertines” like Fronsac and his atheism and love of sex and tolerance of other people’s cultures contrasted by the old order religious fanatics), it is in reality pure pulp nonsense.
Although we get one or two extended battles with the beast itself during the second half of the movie, once the human villains are revealed, it takes a backseat to the more tightly choreographed one-and-one fights between actors. Another recurring theme throughout the movie is, strangely enough, its sympathy towards animals—Mani so identifies with the wolves that he is silently offended by the wholesale slaughter of them earlier in the movie by the French hunters, and even recruits their help in the investigation of the beast. This sympathy eventually extends to the beast itself, whose final moments are in a scene treated almost as an epilogue, where Fronsac finds it incapacitated in the basement of the conspiracy’s lair attended by the old man who had appeared throughout the movie and turns out to be its loving caretaker, and upon recognizing that it is simply a dying animal, ends its life as an act of mercy. For something made to look terrifying, and that is also a vicious man-eater, you can’t really blame it for how it acted—it may be a monster, but it is made clear that its human masters were the real monsters, as trite as that sounds. I can imagine that this movie’s worldwide success and Gans’ eye for stylization are probably the reasons why he was recruited to direct the first Silent Hill film in 2004—it was, maybe unfortunately, not for his mastery of subtle storytelling.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 