"Wilderness" was originally aired as a UK mini-series and ran for a total of 174 minutes. Unfortunately, the version I saw was a movie edited together from the series which runs for only 100 minutes or so, which means there was over an hour of material missing -- so bear in mind that this is a review of the edited movie rather than the series.

It's immeadiately apparent from watching Wilderness that it's based on a novel, and fact is you probably already know the story. There's a whole bunch of books of the same type -- a woman has been living as a werewolf since she hit puberty, which causes problems in her relationships so she goes to see a psychiatrist and there's this guy that she really likes but she's scared he won't understand and he has this ex-wife who's a complete bitch and ... yeah, it sounds like popular British fiction alright, and if you're familiar with it you can predict all of the twists and turns here a while before they actually happen.

The directing feels like your average UK TV series, and so does the acting. Everyone does an okay job, but the real stand-out performance would have to be from Michael Kitchen as the suffering psychiatrist who becomes increasingly unhinged as the story goes on. The fact that there's an hour missing explains why the pacing is all wrong, I guess, and it's possible that I would have enjoyed this a lot more in it's original form as a mini-series.

I wouldn't generally recommend this unless you're a big fan of British TV. You may want to check out the mini-series if you ever get a chance, though.

The Wolf The whole lycanthropy-as-a-metaphor-for-adolesence thing has been done many times, sometimes embarassingly bad (Teen Wolf Too), and sometimes very well (Ginger Snaps). This ranks somewhere inbetween the two of them (Teen Ginger, if you will), as it is quite subtle in places although rather predictable in many ways. It's quite well known than when it comes to special effects, British television can often be very embarassing. Just look at that old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Here, they aren't actually that bad. I might even go so far as to call them convincing and innovative. The transformation scenes inparticular, which are done through the use of morphing between images of the girl and images of a wolf, which sounds like a disaster waiting to happen but actually looks quite good. The best scene is where she is under hypnosis, and suddenly the wolf comes loose and she sits up on the couch, morphing to a wolf and then back again as she does so (see middle photo -- taken in mid-morph). There are some other special effects involved, such as the use of contact lenses (see top photo), but much of it relies on the performance of the lead actress Amanda Ooms. Here they've gone the route of actually having her change into a wolf rather than a cross between a human and a wolf, which generally saves on special effects but it is a bit lazy. For this story, though, it makes perfect sense.

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