The ‘Wolfpack’ Family Is So Controlling They’d Freak Out The Duggars

2015 Sundance Film Festival Portraits - Day 1Duggars, look out. There’s a new creepy overprotective family to watch, and in some ways, they make Jim Bob and Michelle look like Marge and Homer. This family, the Angulos, are the subject of the documentary The Wolfpack that just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, and they’re even more out there than the Duggars. Actually, they’re less ‘out there’ than ‘in there’. Hold on to your denim, guys – it’s going to get weird in here.

The movie follows filmmaker Crystal Moselle as she slowly gets to know the Angulos, which couldn’t have been an easy task. See, Oscar and Susanne Angulo and their six sons and one daughter hardly ever emerge from their Lower East Side apartment – and when I say ‘hardly ever’ I don’t mean ‘a couple of times a week to pick up snacks at the bodega’. I mean, in a good year, the kids report leaving home half a dozen times total. In a lean year, zero outings – because their father, a strict Hare Krishna adherent, is afraid that they’ll get ‘contaminated’ by the moral turpitude of New York City. If they could get past the religion thing, I expect he and Jim Bob Duggar would get along famously.

The Angulo kids, by the way, were between 11 and 18 years old at the time Moselle met them. Good lord – even the Duggar brood got to go to Disneyland. Or, you know, the grocery store. Even being subjected to the indignity of ‘courtship’ sounds better than this weird Rapunzel-esque situation.

But wait, it gets stranger. While the Angulo kids almost never got to see the light of day, they did get to bask freely in the light of the television screen. While most super-restrictive families might put some boundaries on screen time, or at least screen ratings, the Angulo parents gave their kids free reign over the remote control, and Moselle estimates they’ve seen something like five thousand films. That’s just how many times most families have seen Frozen, but the Angulo boys are big fans of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. And they don’t just watch them: they memorize and meticulously recreate them with whatever props are on hand in a cramped Manhattan apartment. I guess when your world is four apartment walls, and when you’ve literally been raised by TV, what else are you going to do with your free time?

According a review from Variety, the movie is both interesting and not particularly well made – but I think I’d still like to see it, with the same dark fascination that inspires Duggar viewings.One question I’m also wondering about is what the life of the Angulo daughter, Visnu, is like: the movie and all the promotional material seem to be focused on the six boys, and I couldn’t find one at all that she appeared in. Apparently one of the boys, Mukunda, wants to become a filmmaker (no surprise there); maybe even if an outsider doesn’t have much to say about his sister, he will.

(Image: Larry Busacca/Getty)

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