Wildlife (2018) poster
2018 · drama · family · indie

Wildlife

Directed by Paul Dano1h 45m2018
ElsewhereIMDb6.833kRT94%Metacritic80TMDB6.6782
  • sombre
  • measured
  • intense
Movie DNA

Sombre, measured, measured drama / family, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

14-year-old Joe is the only child of Jeanette and Jerry — a housewife and a golf pro — in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job (and his sense of purpose) he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves.

Our read · Wildlife (2018) reads as a sombre, measured, grounded drama · family · indie entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

Where the cast leads
Fingerprint

The shape of Wildlife

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want sixties Montana family fracture seen through a teenager's steady gaze.

ends bittersweetit stays with youa slow buildgrips by minute 20attention 4/5earns its length
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upchild peril

Skip it tonightSkip if marital collapse and adolescent helplessness feel too uncomfortably close.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
Your take
Rate it
star-clip-1-0star-clip-2-0star-clip-3-0star-clip-4-0star-clip-5-0
React
Discussion

Discussion

cmd enter to post

What does your Movie DNA look like?

Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.

Calibrate yourself