Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Wolf’s Call’ on Netflix, a French Submarine Thriller About a Seaman with ‘Golden Ears’

Netflix’s The Wolf’s Call, or Le Chant du Loup in its native French, is the latest in a long line of movies in which sonar pings and whines soundtrack suspenseful submarine drama. This modestly budgeted thriller tweaks the formula — you know, pasty men hunched over consoles in cramped control rooms and shouting stuff like “Up periscope!” and “Ten seconds ’til impact!” and “Never mind, it’s just a whale!” — by focusing on the Acoustic Warfare Analyst, or the guy who uses his super-sensitive ears to identify precisely what object is making the sonar sing.

THE WOLF’S CALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Setting: the near future, many leagues under the sea. Chanteraide (Francois Civil) has “golden ears” and an encyclopedic mind. With headphones on and eyes fixated on the sonar readout, he can identify the make and model of a submarine by the whirr of its propeller. He can even distinguish subtle anomalies in the sound to pinpoint specific craft by name. This guy. He’s apparently the Mozart of Acoustic Warfare Analysts.

But there’s one enemy vessel he struggles to ID, and it nearly gets his French Navy sub sunk before the movie can barely get started. Thanks to some improbable heroics, the crew accomplishes its mission and lives to disrupt the peaceful lives of tuna and octopi another day. The XO and CO on board, Grandchamp (Reda Kateb) and D’Orsi (Omar Sy) respectively, pat Monsieur Ears on the back and tell him to put the incident behind him. But Chanteraide gets chewed out by his commandant CIRA (Jean-Yves Berteloot), who chalks up his aural talents as too intuitive in the face of cold, hard calculations. “This is the military, not art school,” the commandant spits, before banning Chanteraide from accessing Navy records.

Yet the origin of the mystery sub gnaws away at Chanteraide, and he goes so far as to identify the commandant’s computer password by the sound of the keystrokes(!). His research takes him to a bookstore, and, eventually, to bed with its manager, Diane (Paula Beer). In the bigger picture, political tensions with Russia intensify, prompting the Navy to deploy Grandchamp and D’Orsi on separate subs, one armed with — gulp — a nuclear warhead. Will Chanteraide end up sweating buckets over a glowing bank of buttons and monitors and blinky things, with the fate of millions in his hands? I’ll never tell.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s been said that Ned, Morgan Freeman’s character in Unforgiven, can shoot a bird in the eye, flyin’. Well, Chanteraide is Ned, except he can hear a fish in the water, swimmin’. So put Super Ears Ned in The Hunt for Red October, Das Boot or Run Silent, Run Deep, and you’ve got The Wolf’s Call.

Performance Worth Watching: In a movie emphasizing macho hoo-ahh and chain-of-command plot theatrics over character development, Kateb’s portrayal of Grandchamp almost offsets his military bravado with a teensy snatch of touchy-feely appreciation for Chanteraide’s remarkable skills. Almost.

Memorable Dialogue: “You hear life. Great,” commandant CIRA says of Chanteraide’s talent, with all the skeptical dismissiveness you’d expect from a brass-balls military lifer.

Single Best Shot: The camera slowly zooms and pans to Chanteraide during a critical moment, centering him in the frame so you can just FEEL him LISTENING REALLY HARD.

Sex and Skin: Chanteraide’s hearing-holes are so sensitive, he can place his head between Diane’s breasts, post-coitus, and listen to the intricacies of her heartbeat.

Our Take: The Wolf’s Call opens with a tense, thoughtfully executed 23-minute action sequence, and concludes with an even more complex and suspenseful 40 minutes of underwater strategy and warfare. The stuff in-between is all aftermath from the former and setup for the latter, and is just contextually realistic enough to be convincing. The screenplay doesn’t get too heavy with character development; Chanteraide’s talent may be extraordinary, but the rest of him is a soporific blank.

Such is the formula of genre filmmaking, which tends to emphasize tidy narrative schemes (irony is a considerably corny element here) and directorial prowess over any sort of broad commentary. Maybe you could assert that the film is about the flaws of military command procedure, which can be too, you know, militant for its own good — although that feels like a stretch, because it’s more of a device to systematically keep lowering the protagonist’s chances of survival in the third act. This is an overcomplicated way of saying you’ll forgive The Wolf’s Call for its contrivances because it succeeds at fulfilling its modest ambition of being a diverting exercise in tension and release.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nobody’s reinventing the propeller here, but The Wolf’s Call is damn good at keeping us entertained.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Wolf's Call on Netflix