Ferine

 Man is at bottom a wild, terrible animal. We know him only in that state of tameness and domestication called civilization: this is why we are frightened by the rare eruptions of his true nature. But remove the chains of legal order, and in anarchy man will reveal himself for what he is. 

Arthur Schopenhauer 

The ambitious opening quotation of Ferine immediately sets us on a clearly defined path. 

The film seems intent on developing this premise through Irene’s metamorphosis: an artist who, following a trauma, progressively abandons the conventions of civilization to indulge her animal nature. 

But finding a meaning retrospectively in an attempt to salvage a film is not the same as identifying an idea sufficiently precise to justify the cinematic undertaking. Ambiguity can be productive; inconsistency, on the other hand, does not become depth simply by assuming the guise of allegory. 

Corsini attempts to set the rationality of civilization against repressed ferality, making trauma the trigger for a liberation that should free Irene from social constraints. The architectural Brutalism, with its concrete surfaces and relentless geometry, visually translates this rationality into a form of imprisonment. Particularly striking is the contrast between the settings: the collector’s contemporary, functional house, an expression of a power that organizes and disposes of things, and the house of Dama, the trafficker in exotic predators, a classical, sumptuous residence, steeped in a beauty belonging to an apparently established cultural order. Two opposing spaces, yet both potentially capable of turning into cages. Civilization does not eliminate violence; it regulates its forms and determines who may legitimately exercise it. 

The trafficker owns the animals, hunts them and captures them, while Irene, now herself a creature to be exhibited, is locked in a cage. Economic power can turn even rebellion into an object to be observed, classified and possessed. But the reversal remains problematic: if the violence of domination is no more legitimate than that of the beast, it does not follow that every instinctive act is therefore emancipatory. Irene kills, attacks and devours; trauma may explain her transformation, but it cannot absolve her. The film seems to oscillate between denouncing oppression and celebrating instinct, risking a confusion between authenticity and the destruction of every limit. 

The world of contemporary art also offers material for a potentially incisive satire. Wounded bodies, dismembered carcasses, blood and sexual performances make up a universe in which transgression is presented as an instrument of liberation, yet remains protected by the conventions and privileges of those who stage it. Art claims to break taboos while turning them into spectacle. When Irene destroys the paintings and bursts in with violence that is no longer symbolic, she should undermine the machinery of institutionalized provocation. And yet the film ends up adopting the very same mechanisms: it piles up extreme images, exposed bodies and shocking situations, as though transgression could take the place of thought. 

Motherhood introduces another contradiction. Unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Irene embarks on an alternative path. Motherhood, initially mediated by procedures and social agreements, resurfaces in a feral dimension, beyond the reach of institutions. The outlines of a possible maternal horror emerge, in which reproduction coincides with a metamorphosis that calls the very idea of humanity into question. But the ending leaves an uncomfortable question unanswered: does Irene truly achieve emancipation, or, having rejected social conventions, is she brought back to a biological destiny that the film seems to present as the natural culmination of her transformation? 

The problem is that these intuitions find no narrative structure capable of sustaining them. The jaguar appearing in the house, the massacres, Irene’s capture, the cage, the escape and the final childbirth unfold in a progression that undermines the credibility of events and makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish deliberate grotesquerie from unintentional absurdity. The motif of the cages, too, although consistent with the allegorical framework, is reiterated until it loses its incisiveness. The settings remain the film’s most convincing element: the spaces possess a presence and a contrast that the narrative fails to translate into anything equally precise. 

Ferine seeks to interrogate the boundary between civilization and barbarism, liberation and violence, the body as an object of control and the body that escapes all discipline. But simply reversing the hierarchy, turning the beast into a victim and the human being into the real monster, is not enough to produce a meaningful reflection. When allegory precedes the characters and every event seems conceived to illustrate a thesis already declared, ambiguity dwindles into indeterminacy and provocation into mannerism. The film thus ends up reproducing what it seems intent on criticizing: the transformation of living beings into spectacle, consumed through increasingly extreme images. A contradiction that could have become the film’s critical core but remains, like so many others, devoid of a cinematic form capable of making it genuinely productive. 

Civilization is a thin layer of ice extending over a deep ocean of darkness and chaos. 

Werner Herzog