Big Bad Wolves, Cinemas across London

Quentin Tarantino recently named Big Bad Wolves, the latest film from the Israeli directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the ‘best film of the year’. It’s easy to see why he - in particular - would like it. Combining a darkly comic revenge plot with a campy, retro soundtrack and stylized violence, Big Bad Wolves is positively dripping with a Tarantino-esque atmosphere.                                          

But for those who grow weary of the self indulgence of Tarantino’s films, Big Bad Wolves will provide a welcome alternative. The film, which centres around the murder of a young girl and her father’s efforts to exact revenge on her killer, is much more concerned with morality than your average blood-and-guts, ultra-violent revenge movie. The father’s methods of exacting revenge are gruesome and shocking (not to mention really, very funny), but the film is more concerned with the moral implications of these gruesome and shocking methods, than it is with their gruesomeness and shockingness per se. In other words, this isn’t simply violence for violence’s sake (eh, Quentin?).

That said, the violence is very entertaining, and it’s a large part of what makes this film so good. Unlike a lot of films of its kind, including Tarantino’s, the violence in Big Bad Wolves isn’t ultra-slick and cool. Instead, it’s farcical and comic and fraught with accident and interruption: it’s as funny as it is wince-enducing. 

The directors Keshales and Papushado were, incidentally, the makers of the first ever Israeli horror film, Rabies (2010). It was part of the official selection at Tribeca and was nominated for an enormous 11 Ophirs, the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars. So it’s not just Quentin Tarantino who likes them.

Big Bad Wolves opened on 7 December