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some kind of witcher prequel
Before you start reading:
this is a review of The Nightmare of the Wolf (2021) directed by Han Kwang-il and it contains spoilers.
Read my review on Letterboxd if you don’t want to be spoiled.
the good: good quality animation, great banter and some very interesting original characters, another look into the lore of the world of the witcher, cool monster design
the bad: weird choices about the timeline, some questionable narrative choices ...and SPOILERS.
i was looking forward to this movie. the witcher s2 is so far away still, and i have no way to justify a third playthrough of wild hunt, so i really hoped it would help me get some kind of fix. the good news is that the mood is right: we have a witcher fighting monsters, we have the intrinsic tragedy of being a witcher, and we have excellent animation to tell us that story. there's also a lot of stuff that left me with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth though. i enjoyed myself, but i wish i liked it more.
what to expect going in
the nightmare of the wolf is about vesemir’s past and the fall of kaer morhen.
in the kaedweni court the sorcerer tetra is campaigning to get the witchers removed from kaer morhen, because they’re dangerous and greedy and they’re conspiring against the people; lady zerbst is the main opposition to her argument: witchers save lives and slay the monsters.
but there is something weird going on in the woods of kaedwen. through his acquaintance with filavandrel vesemir finds out that it might have something to do with the disappearance of some elvish girls.
through a flashback, we learn that vesemir worked as a servant in a rich household as a kid, until the witcher deglan came to liberate his lord’s wife from a monster that was plaguing her. intrigued by the notion of easy coin, he leaves to follow deglan to kaer morhen, where he gets turned into a witcher after horrifying tests and trials. as an adult, vesemir loves coin and pleasures, and he’s extremely good at getting them.
in the present day, while vesemir is in town to drink, there’s a brawl, and he’s arrested by the kaedweni authorities. lady zerbst - who is actually illyana, vesemir’s childhood friend - takes the chance to ask him to go with tetra in the woods and slay the mysterious monster that is killing the people.
vesemir and tetra find out that the source of the chaos is kitsu, an elven girl that was mutated into something with incredible magical powers. only the mages in kaer morhen know about mutagenic alchemy, so clearly the witchers are at fault and she gets the permission to attack kaer morhen.
vesemir confronts deglan about it, but before they can properly have a fight about it tetra launches her attack: she tricked kitsu into helping her, so the keep is overwhelmed with magical attacks and monsters. vesemir manages to kill tetra but the keep is lost - deglan is dead, illyana is dead, the other witchers are dead; only four young witcher kids remain (geralt among them) and it’s vesemir’s duty to raise them.
before i started whining
the animation was insanely good. studio mir is always amazing and especially in the fighting sequences it really knocked it out of the park. i was pleasantly surprised by the emotional sequences too - sometimes characters expressing emotions look weird in animation, but everything just looked stunning this time.
vesemir, at face value, is a fun character: at the beginning he seems a prick for no reason, but then you have the change to explore his backstory and build a more complex reading of his personality, and from there he gets a decent (if a bit rushed) character arc. it doesn’t hurt that he’s hot, which is happily exploited for mandatory bath scene, and that he cannot shut the fuck up to save his life, which is hilarious. he’s extremely good at what he does, and he’s got plenty of screen time to show it off.
i really liked the moments where he was repeating - quoting, even - deglan’s teachings; i have a soft spot for that kind of internalization, especially when it’s for lessons that are meant to be unlearned at some point. and vesemir’s got plenty of them - even if it wasn’t exactly addressed in the movie.
the pacing was good, too. i often complain about the fact that a lot of contemporary media feel like they have to be at 100 at all times, and there’s no room for modulation, but nightmare of the wolf is full of quiet moments where the characters just talk and emote, so that was refreshing.
that bitter aftertaste
i don’t consider myself a lore nut when it comes to the witcher - although i might have scavenged every single bit of available information and spent a long time speculating and overthinking about it...
the thing is, witcher lore is flexible which is a nice way to say that it’s a dumpster fire; between the books and the comics and the games and the new netflix adaptation, there’s at least four different interpretations of every single given event. so i wasn’t planning on getting hung up on the way lore was handled in this movie, but…
the timeline
as much fun i had with a young hot fuckboy vesemir doing his thing, i was pretty surprised. according to the updated netflix timeline, vesemir was seventy when the attack to kaer morhen happened - much younger than i thought. according to game lore, vesemir was old enough to have seen kaer morhen being built and established as a witcher school.
so yeah, that was weird. especially because geralt is much younger in turn. he’s five years old when the sack happens and he already went through the trials despite having been at kaer morhen for a single winter? what about the fact that apparently vesemir gave geralt his name? but anyway.
the witcher trials
again, the lore can’t agree on what the witcher trials look like. so netflix invented a new trial: the gauntlet of the red swamp: before being mutated by alchemy, the kids are left in a swamp infested by wraiths and other monsters to test their survival skills with only their medallions.
it’s exactly the same concept as the trials of the mountain, except the kids are already trained and mutated and have a fighting chance. i don’t understand why the gratuitous carnage. it makes me mad.
this is me being a baby, but i was upset at the amount of gratuitous gore in general. too many eyeballs escaping their sockets for my tastes, and too many children torn apart for funsies. not even castlevania was this bad
deglan and the kaer morhen attack
the sack of kaer morhen is a crucial event in the witcher lore that is never actually described in detail anywhere. we only know that at some point a mob attacked the keep and shit went down. many witchers were killed and all the secrets of witcher-making were lost with the mages that kept them.
i appreciated the attempt at making it less black-and-white that it could’ve been, but on the other hand - it was nuanced, but not nuanced enough. the whole underlying current of “well, the witchers brought this upon themselves because they’ve been greedy and they tried to play god” is not the kind of narrative that should emerge from this kind of thing, i believe - and yet.
deglan wasn’t acting out of greed, he was clearly trying to keep kaer morhen running and the witchers alive - but it happened too quickly and it feels like the only redemptive thing about him are his last words to vesemir.
vesemir’s character arc feels a bit cheap because of it: from poor kid who never wants to be hungry again, to selfish fuckboy who enjoys pleasure and riches and only does things for coin, to someone who prefers doing the right thing because there’s more important things than coin, and is now a single dad with a mission. well. they tried. i would’ve preferred something with the witchers clearly in a position of blamelessness against an irrational angry mob whose real enemy were their own nightmares.
luka's death
ok i’m not gonna lie, this is the real reason ive been bitter about the whole thing.
nightmare of the wolf is the rogue one of the witcher lore: we already know everyone dies. we went in knowing that. it’s been foretold. so why did the authors feel necessary to single out the only openly queer character in the whole movie and kill him on screen in the most meaningless way possible?
edit: this is what the author had to say about it but still - what a choice, man
at the end of the day, it’s a cool animated movie with some cool ideas. it’s an enjoyable hour and a half of banter, monster fighting and feelings. i am not entirely convinced about its place in the lore and im a bit worried about seeing how and if it’s going to have impact on the witcher s2 ...
but that’s why fanfiction exist, amirite?