Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: TV and Film, Netflix, Documentaries
Jess Hardiman
Netflix viewers are calling a ‘brutal’ new documentary their ‘New Year’s obsession’, after it dropped on the streaming site on 31 December.
Feature-length documentary Misha and the Wolves, which was originally released in 2021, follows the story of Holocaust survivor Misha Defonseca, whose personal account of escaping Nazi Germany as a child – and then being taken in by a pack of wolves in the wilderness – became a bestselling book that proved sometimes real life really can be stranger than fiction.
But the global success of her memoir was followed by a fallout, after her publisher Jane Daniel turned detective and began unravelling a web of secrets and lies.
A synopsis from Netflix says: “As a little girl, she escaped the Holocaust and lived among wolves. Or did she? An extraordinary story elicits sympathy - then draws scrutiny.”
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The film has an impressive 85 percent score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, while social media users are also singing its praises.
One wrote: "Bloody hell. Misha and The Wolves is brutal," while someone else said: "Misha and the Wolves on Netflix is wild."
A third added: "Just watched Misha and the Wolves, which is bizarre but also quite sad really. I think people making up crazy s**t might be my new year obsession."
Another said they were 'absolutely gobsmacked' by the story, while a fifth added: "Misha and the Wolves on Netflix is crazy! Lmao, these people can’t be real."
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Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the time of its original release, filmmaker Sam Hobkinson said he and his team had to be careful about how they depicted the falsehoods of the bizarre tale.
“Misha and the Wolves is the story of a lie," he explained.
“When you make a documentary film about an untruth, you are inverting the form, turning it on its head.
“There is a fiction at the heart of your non-fiction film and it releases a ton of formal and creative possibilities.
“I wanted to make a psychological thriller about belief, about how and why we believe the stories we are told, and it seemed this was the perfect story to do it with.”
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Hobkinson continued: “We were always aware that this could be seen as a film that fanned the flames of Holocaust denial — the theory that if one Holocaust account is questionable, how can we believe any?”
“Many potential funders were queasy about signing up to a film that might be seen to do this. We were at pains to stress that we wanted to wrestle the story back from the Holocaust deniers by using it as a plea for rigor of research based on fact.”
Watch Misha and the Wolves on Netflix now.