By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2 cats
Director: Ludovic Boukherma | Zoran Boukherma
Starring: Alain Boitel | Anthony Bajon | Christine Gautier | Guillaume Mattera | Jean-Michel Ricart | Ludovic Torrent | Noémie Lvovsky
Country: france
Year: 2021
Running time: 88
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10469804/reference
“TEDDY is a modern take on werewolf lore and is set for release next week in French theaters. The film’s title protagonist is a young man in his early 20s that is still very much lost in the world. He is a school dropout who has his proverbial claws dug into a superficial relationship with companion Rebecca who is slowly diverging from his vision of what the future holds for both of them. It is this connection with Rebecca that provides the backbone of Teddy’s motivations in the end, but this is not apparent from the get-go, and it even deviates from this plot point at different parts in the middle of the plot, so the audience is left with a bit of a head-scratcher at times in the final scenes, especially when the closing credits sequence makes this loose, lack-of-substance relationship a romantic lullaby out of the blue (that’s not a spoiler—it’s just a random and confusing coda that stylistically doesn’t match the rest of the film).
“Concurrent to this loosely knit narrative of a dead-end kid working a dead-end temp job in a dead-end relationship is a ‘mysterious’ plot line that involves sheep that have been found slaughtered in the Pyrenees community in which the film is set. ‘Mysterious’ is a bit of a facetious descriptor, as this werewolf/unknown-beast genre trope has undoubtedly been used dozens upon dozens of times. Instead of evolving the trope or using it as some sort of bait and switch to give the audience something fresh, that’s pretty much it: just a wolf-like creature that’s killing animals in the dead of night while Teddy is having daily tantrums on the flipside of the 24-hour cycle.
“To help the dueling plots connect, Teddy—who has been following the reports of the animal(?) plaguing the countryside—eventually has an off-camera encounter with the beast, which sets the stage for his unexplainable series of reactions to daily life and gradual physical changes. It is with these changes that Directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma engage in some high-level cringe body horror to get the audience squirming in their seats. The duo certainly knows how work the camera and provide some interesting angles and point-of-views for their scenes, maximizing the notable efforts of the production design team along the way, but there is nothing there character-wise to invest in even though the camera does a applause-worthy job of guiding us through these scenes so that it doesn’t become a total snoozer. The two most endearing characters in the entire movie are the elderly ‘uncle’ Pepin and an invalid aunt who have taken Teddy in, and to top it off, the aunt doesn’t even speak a word and doesn’t emote since she has a debilitating condition. The fact that the film draws more sympathy and concern for these two minor characters over the lead sets the stage for a series of events that the audience will sit through but struggle to understand why it’s of any value to any potential overall takeaways of the film.
“In the end, the film’s screenplay stumbles along as it builds toward the inevitable payoff of Teddy’s climatic transformation, an event that is triggered by—and eventually mimics—what a male version of CARRIE might feature, except make the telekinetic protagonist a lycanthrope. Also in contrast to the superior 70s classic, there is also no real audience pity built into Teddy’s motivations at the end, as he’s characterized as a jerk for basically the entire length of the film, with the exception of a few moments where he is a victim. But, those victim scenarios are fairly outlandish and out of nowhere. One can call into question that it may be intended to be dark comedy at times, but if so, as a fan of boundary-pushing and dark punch lines that test our sensibilities, it’s really just unfunny if that is indeed part of the intent in those moments. If the intent is actual drama in those sympathy moments, it’s a surefire candidate for audience riffing once the film has aged a bit. In retrospect, it does seem like a film that probably started with an idea for where it wanted to go in the climatic ending sequences, but it just didn’t know how to properly formulate a story compelling enough to get us there.
“This is a 3 cat film if we are basing it on technical film-making know-how, but no better than 2 cats when considering how the story needs to connect dots a little more crisply.”