Metacritic reviews

A clever, sharp-fanged mélange of classic midnight-movie horror and modern indie ingenuity.

A supernatural “What’s Happening to My Body?” parable in company with “Carrie,” “Ginger Snaps” and last year’s “Thelma,” Wildling is low-key with an undertone of menace, skillfully directed by Fritz Böhm in his feature debut (though some of his nighttime scenes are so dark it’s genuinely hard to tell what’s going on).

It’s a promising debut for Böhm, with a lot of promise. But it’s a home run for Powley, who makes Wildling worth watching even when it shouldn’t be.

Wildling may swerve last-minute into a less dense finale, but Bel Powley's performance is worth this fierce and untamed coming-of-self arc that's so exquisitely female-centered.

Shifting the film into action mode necessitates several leaps of faith to keep pace with the plot as Powley goes crashing through the forest with near abandon.

Böhm doesn't do so well with Wildling's scare scenes and gore, because he seems more focused on making a coming-of-age character study than an effective fright-flick. But he has one remarkable character in Anna, who's played by Powley as a feral gal with a heartbreakingly doleful soul.

As Wildling’s center, Powley keeps our attention in her orbit, and Böhm constructs a universe around her that’s worthy of her talent (if at times too murkily filmed for its own good). But the movie loses its thread 15 minutes or so into its running time.

This creature feature from the director Fritz Böhm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I-was-a-teenage-monster movies.

Wildling starts out strongly but the qualities that make the first 20 minutes engrossing and harrowing drain away and the movie morphs into a thoroughly unsatisfying excursion into fantasy-tinged horror.

The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.