By Matt Mueller Culture Editor Published Aug 01, 2015 at 1:56 PM

For the most part, the Angulo brothers – Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda and Narayana – are just like any other band of young growing boys. They love movies, particularly those related to Batman and Quentin Tarantino. They’re a little awkward around girls, and they’re beginning to rebel against their parents’ strict rules, thinking and behaving for themselves.

It’s the rules they’re pushing up against where things take a turn for the surreal.

Like a real-life version of the 2010 Greek film "Dogtooth," for almost all of their young lives, their parents refused to let the boys and their little sister Visnu leave their dark, drab Lower East Side New York City apartment. Sometimes they’d get out maybe nine times in a year, one brother recalls; another year, they only left once. One year, they never left at all, the apartment’s windows and the glow of a TV playing movies serving as their only views to the world outside of their small familial cult.

First-time director Crystal Moselle certainly stumbles onto a fascinating story for her debut documentary "The Wolfpack," arriving into and chronicling the clan just as it seems a fuse has quietly started burning through the bloodline. She doesn’t waste it either, thoroughly absorbing the viewer into a bizarre, often unsettling psychological experiment playing out right in reality. Under her keen and intimate watch, what could have been a TLC-ready exploitative gawp-fest is instead crafted into one of the year’s most mesmerizing films.

Recorded over the course of about four years, "The Wolfpack" fully immerses the audience into the world of the Angulo apartment, a claustrophobic and paranoid, if tenderly close-knit, environment fostered by the family’s rarely seen but tensely felt Peruvian father Oscar. Fear rules over the family’s tightly packed cultish commune whether it be toward their father – drunk on his own god-like power in addition to alcohol – or the outside world, with both parents limply using the surrounding neighborhood to rationalize their seclusion.

The fearful and fearsome atmosphere bleeds over to the kids, their mother – a former free-spirit from the Midwest who sounds like she complies more than agrees with the methods even early on in proceedings – and "The Wolfpack" in general, especially as captured by the grainy, handheld eye of Moselle’s camera. It’s not a particularly polished film – shots are sometimes shaky, and the timeline gets a little muddled – but her smart and raw approach (for instance, during a hallucinatory Halloween celebration) amps up the disturbing intimacy and fits the closed-off and paranoid environment fostered.

Seemingly every shot in Moselle’s film works to capture the Angulo boys’ dark, creepily alien childhood – from B-roll shots of the outside world, often framed from behind windows or fences, to the carefully picked archival footage from the family. One shot forebodingly lingers on the apartment’s perfect view of the once standing World Trade Center towers, hinting at the additional outside terrors to be tossed on the paranoid fire. Another archival shot – the product of a perfect VHS recording accident – replaces the top half of Oscar’s head with chaotic muddled static, an eerie image that conveys more about Oscar’s mind than any interview could (as proven later when Oscar gives a rare interview to Moselle, a mess of gibberish and denial).

All of it points toward making the viewer feel just as unsettlingly held prisoner in a disturbed haven finally coming apart at the seams. The only real bizarre relief is the playful, caring and surprisingly self-aware boys and their crazily on-point movie reenactments (so much so that a S.W.A.T. team executed a weapons raid on the apartment, only to find elaborate prop guns made of cardboard and tin foil). When one does finally escape for a brief incognito jaunt around the city, Moselle captures it like a first-person sensory overload – all taken in distanced from behind a mask.

In a movie filled with fascinating intrigue, that moment and the boys’ increasingly further trips into the outside world are the most interesting sequences of "The Wolfpack," the key experiment of the Moselle’s real-life psychological study. What happens when boys left inside for their lives finally get to see and experience the world they previously only viewed through Hollywood’s lens?

 It’s no wonder that when they do finally start emerging regularly from their film-heavy apartment, they’re dressed like overly formal Tarantino gangsters with long feral ’80s haircuts or that they react to the grass and plants the way some people amazedly reacted to "Avatar" ("It’s like 3-D!" one exclaims).

It’s not just their love of film that shows up as they explore; the fear learned from their upbringing still lingers as well. One boy is positive they’re being followed one night; another is scared of the ocean, stuck watching his brothers celebrate their freedom from the beach. They may be rebelling and escaping, but there are still mental tethers keeping them tied and attached to their disturbed past.

These exploration sequences are endlessly fascinating, seeing the effects of extreme nurture play out in front of one’s eyes. The eerie apartment parts serves as strong, magnetic stage-setting, but the boys’ outside trips are where "The Wolfpack" makes the most of its psychologically loaded premise, finding the meaning and result in their bizarre experience. You almost wish there were more of them. Then again, I’m sure the boys wish they had more of them in their secluded lives too

Still, all the while, Moselle intimately captures their journeys in all of their youthful joy, awkwardness and emotional conflict. There’s still growing resentment toward their dad, and their mother is still tucked away still at home. They’re still outsiders, struggling to interact with others; one of the boys, for instance, tries to connect with his co-workers – through TV shows, of course – with little to show for it (the conversation’s brilliant final shot puts a pillar between him and his mates).

There’s also something sweet about the boys finally seeing the world and engaging with it, and the infectiousness of their sense of discovery. By the end, even their mother joins in, calling her parents – who, from the sounds of it, didn’t even know she had children – for the first time in years and joining the boys outside. Their story is still going, but Moselle’s final shots, sweet and joyful but also utterly heartbreaking, perfectly capture the family’s fragile state, fracturing and healing at the same time.

The film begs for a sequel – or maybe even a regularly incremented "Up Series" treatment – but until then, "The Wolfpack" gives the audience plenty to chew on. The Angulo boys spent years living through movies; now their lives are literally one – and a pretty fantastic one at that. 

Matt Mueller Culture Editor

As much as it is a gigantic cliché to say that one has always had a passion for film, Matt Mueller has always had a passion for film. Whether it was bringing in the latest movie reviews for his first grade show-and-tell or writing film reviews for the St. Norbert College Times as a high school student, Matt is way too obsessed with movies for his own good.

When he's not writing about the latest blockbuster or talking much too glowingly about "Piranha 3D," Matt can probably be found watching literally any sport (minus cricket) or working at - get this - a local movie theater. Or watching a movie. Yeah, he's probably watching a movie.