The Wolf's Call (2019)
August 8, 2023 8:20 AM - Subscribe

[TRAILER] On board a French nuclear submarine, a rescue mission depends on a man with a golden ear.

Starring François Civil, Omar Sy, Mathieu Kassovitz, Reda Kateb, Paula Beer, Alexis Michalik, Jean-Yves Berteloot.

Written & directed by Antonin Baudry. A French language film.

85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

JustWatch.

kaibutsu was kind enough to support MeFi with a donation. Their request was for six films about submarines. I'll be using the tag #SubCinema

Donate $25 or more to MeFi and you can MeMail me a request for a themed day of your own. I'll fill up the sidebar on FF with six movies that fit your theme.
posted by DirtyOldTown (6 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Watched this last night. I'm usually interested in stories of someone with a cool exceptional skill.

Note that the Amazon Prime version does not really have French audio. Apple+ does.

Kind of amusing that the dramatic tension dies in the middle of the movie -- there wasn't really any reason to care about the four-propeller sub, which didn't do anything sinister in the first act, it was just a pure mystery that happened to be relevant later. Feel like they should have sold this part with more character development for our hero and his gf.

Or perhaps buttressed the bond between our hero and his daddy CO. The sudden flip to him being on the outs and everyone getting him with pothead barbs was kind of unintentionally hilarious I thought. Not really a wholly baked story.

At times it was all right. Though personally if I was swimming towards a hostile submarine I would not put my body directly in the path of its torpedo tubes should they happen to suddenly fire out of the exact one I was in front of.
posted by fleacircus at 10:11 AM on August 9, 2023


> Note that the Amazon Prime version does not really have French audio. Apple+ does.

I don't speak French and if I watch this will be reading subtitles. Does it matter which version I watch? I want to hear the original French audio.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:06 PM on August 9, 2023


Well I rented it from Amazon Prime, then found out it only has dubbed English. So I took a chance and rented it on Apple+, and it had French audio. So idk, YMMV!
posted by fleacircus at 8:54 PM on August 9, 2023


I rented it on YouTube, which has an option for the original French with English... Subs.

As a person who spends at least half an hour each day looking at spectrograms, I appreciated the focus on sonar! Love the operational detail - running from valve to valve to get a sip of oxygen, death by carbon monoxide...

I thought the tension held up just fine in the second half; everybody is forced to do completely horrific things, either launching a nuclear missile, or trying to kill your friends before they do so. It shifts from an 'enemy unknown' scenario to the exact opposite, where everyone knows all of the playbooks and are still trying to figure out how to win.

(The nuclear code authentication scene seemed like it wasn't in the submarine, though - an overhead windowed room with loose tea cups? I'm not sure if this was meant to be a flashback, or of somehow the Formidable has a spacious staff lounge.)

(I also expected the green shoes to play some role in identifying the hero in some total fscking chaos, or perhaps a body bag.)

Notes for future Star Trek writers:
Sonar, of course, won't work in space. But you could probably make something up with subspace ether signatures of impulse drives. And you can totally blow out the hotshot ensign analyst's ear drums with a desperate space walk... I also don't know that we've had any Star Trek episodes dive into the management of gases on a closed star ship - you can outdo the Expanse on the scifi hardness scale with this one...
posted by kaibutsu at 9:31 PM on August 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


It was strange to go from this to "The Bureau" and encounter Mathieu Kassovitz again. Everything's coming up Malotru/ALFOST!
posted by fleacircus at 1:54 PM on August 22, 2023


Watching this. Wondering at what point his new girlfriend will realise he might be a while. He left her in the car while he popped in to look up some audio files, got nicked by his superior and locked in the file room for a while, got let out in time to run into a bunker to escape nuclear annihilation, persuaded the admiral of the fleet that it was a false flag attack and has just been airlifted on to a submarine. That is a serious ghosting.
posted by biffa at 2:02 PM on May 24


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