WENDELL & WILD. Can be Cruel, Even Unpleasant

Wendell & Wild. Catherine on her passport. Kay-Kay to strangers. Kat to those closest to her. Beautiful, colorful childhood years, with everything in abundance: love, sweets, attention, and attractions. Her parents run a rapidly growing brewery. A bright, rose-strewn future lies ahead of Kat. If only it weren’t for that damn winter, the slippery road, and the ill-fated bridge. The girl survives, but her guardians are lost in the watery depths. A few years later, teenage Kat is consumed by growing frustration and guilt. She shouldn’t have been screaming so much in the car. Dad wouldn’t have taken his hands off the wheel then.

It was me, it was me who killed them. Anger turns into rebellion and defiance. Instead of elite schools—reformatories; instead of Erasmus exchanges—handcuffs for greater and lesser offenses; instead of savoring freedom—constant supervision. For Kat, this may be the last chance to pull herself together and be saved. The teenager ends up in a Catholic girls’ school in her hometown of Rust Bank—once a sunny resort, now an apocalyptic backwater shrouded in dust and fog.

Wendell and Wild are brothers, demons from a parallel world. Spirits evil by nature, but friendly by disposition. They dream of escaping their cruel jobs in the afterlife and opening an amusement park on Earth. A pact is struck, an agreement reached. Kat will be useful to Wendell and Wild. The devils will provide the girl with a certain service. On the surface, it’s a win-win situation, with no fine print hidden in the contract signed in blood. Everything would be perfect—if not for those fateful twists of fate once again. Kat will claim the prize, but first she must understand and accept loss. That, after all, is the governing logic of a fairy tale.

Henry Selick (responsible for the outstanding, timeless Coraline and the Secret Door) returns once more to spells and somber fantasy. Again, he tells the story of a girl undergoing a mental breakdown—unable to cope with trauma, unreconciled with fate, and searching for escape. A painful past has completely reshaped her, turned her value system upside down, and stripped away illusions. Kat finds no help in this world, so she seeks it somewhere beyond. A Catholic school, where belief in a metaphysical order is taken for granted, seems like the right place. Supernatural forces, good and evil alike, are part of everyday life. Perhaps one of them can help her contact her parents?

The film is a cinema of constant psychoanalysis, unfolding in a dark reality and a tongue-in-cheek infernal abyss. Kat balances between these two dimensions, projecting onto them her fears and recurring depressive states. At one point, the heroine concludes that there is nothing worse than “good memories.” They overlap with a hopeless Now, starkly highlighting the unfavorable change. They don’t lift the spirit; they push it toward the abyss. The film is demanding and psychologically complex. The screenwriting duo—Henry Selick and Jordan Peele—take no shortcuts on Kat’s inner journey.

The creators devote most of their time to Kat’s emotional instability: working through trauma and coming to terms with loss. The film also offers a broader perspective on the local community. The city council battles pressure from a corporation planning to build a commercial prison in Rust Bank. School guardians are people with a calling, able to communicate properly with children. The children, in turn, are gifted with sensitivity and the capacity for gratitude. The film can be cruel, even unpleasant. A cadaverous aura and frequent fecal aesthetics may repel, but they give Selick’s work a distinctive atmosphere—spatial depth and a certain slickness.

Above all, these elements serve the final effect, when individual rays of sun become even more visible and enthusiasm and optimism appear in the characters’ outlooks. The director knows that the sight of a calm, cloudless sky is incomparably more majestic when it is preceded by a horizon-spanning storm.