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Rising Wolf – Ascendant Movie Storyline. A young woman (Charlotte Best) wakes, trapped, kidnapped in an elevator of a super high rise building at the mercy of her tormentors. This stylistic thriller, set in Shanghai, explores a young woman’s instinct to survive in a situation out of her control. Trapped, without any form of escape, and cocooned in the belly of the beast, Aria is forced to adapt her thinking, her beliefs and her endurance. This is the first of the journeys that assault her mind and her senses, pinning her down in anguish only to emerge connected to abilities that define who she truly is.
Rising Wolf (Ascendant) is a 2021 Australian science fiction thriller about a young female environmentalist who wakes up trapped and kidnapped. Worse, she’s in the elevator of a super high-rise building and completely at the mercy of her tormentors. Also known as Rising Wolf. Directed by Antaine Furlong [as Anthony Furlong] (short: Emergence) from a screenplay co-written with Kieron Holland, the movie stars Charlotte Best, Jonny Pasvolsky, Andrew Jack and Susan Prior.
Film Review for Rising Wolf (Ascendant)
Rising Wolf is not the movie you expect it to be. The setup is something close to another single-location, Saw-adjacent white-knuckler, with Aria Wolf (Best) trapped inside a rapidly dropping and rising elevator in a Shanghai high-rise at the behest of Russian baddies that have taken her and her father hostage. On the screens making up one wall of the box, Aria watches as her father gets brutally tortured for information, as she herself is continually, ruthlessly flung from ceiling to floor, abandoned by gravity as her enclosure flies down the shaft of the building. On paper, this is somewhere close to horror.
But writer/director Antaine Furlong and co-writer Kieron Holland have different intentions for this story. With a backstory told through copious flashback sequences alongside an expanding sense of scope as the run time progresses, Rising Wolf turns out to be what is seemingly the hopeful first chapter of a YA-type fantasy series, this apparently being the origin of our titular hero. The (literal) elevator pitch serves as a clever intentional misdirect so that as these larger ambitions come to light, ideally you’ll be impressed by how something so small in scale turns out to be much larger than you initially predicted.
All that is well and good, if only the film itself was in any way capable of pulling off that kind of magic trick. Instead, Furlong’s debut feature often feels awkward and unsure of itself, unable to pull off the tightrope act it’s trying to perform. Though the claustrophobic setting is ultimately meant to act as a vessel through which we learn the personal intricacies of our protagonist, Best is hardly given much of a character to play at all. She tries her hardest and manages to imbue some physical bravado in a role that doesn’t afford her much past getting thrown around the room and crying, while everyone surrounding her delivers ham-fisted dialogue through stilted, strained performances.
This overambitious, underwritten movie also has the temerity to set up a cliffhanger ending, as if it’s remotely completed the basic task of creating a world and characters to carry a film. Instead, it feels like there’s an entire story and endless lore existing right outside the walls of the elevator that we never get to indulge in. Rising Wolf gets so caught up in the idea of a supposed potential franchise that it forgets to make you care about the film you’re currently watching.
Rising Wolf – Ascendant (2021)
Directed by: Antaine Furlong
Starring: Charlotte Best, Jonny Pasvolsky, Karelina Clarke, Susan Prior, Andrew Jack, Lily Stewart, Tahlia Sturzaker, Elsa Cocquerel, Alex Menglet, John Harding, Yoji Tatsuta, Kelsey Skinner
Screenplay by: Antaine Furlong, Kieron Holland
Production Design by: Fiona Donovan
Cinematography by: Frank Flick
Film Editing by: Jonathan Tappin
Costume Design by: Dannielle Alexander
Set Decoration by: Diana Robertson
Music by: David Hirschfelder
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Release Date: August 10, 2021
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