Jessica Reynolds delivers a career-defining performance as a feral girl raised by wolves. When she’s discovered by humans, she’s whisked away to a repurposed offshore oil rig by a couple of ecologically-minded preppers. Raised as their daughter for a future in which most of humanity will be wiped away by climate apocalypse, the girl is forced to confront moral dilemmas beyond her comprehension and navigate her own exploitation by a human world seemingly beyond redemption.

David Verbeek’s latest film continually subverts our expectations from the very start, keeping the viewer surprised with each new development in its truly one-of-a-kind story. An idiosyncratic bildungsroman for the Anthropocene, The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard is a penetrating examination of what it means to be human, interrogating the boundary between nature and culture as the former seems poised to forever engulf the latter.—Frédéric Boyer

David Verbeek