Good morrow, peasants, and welcome to our review of Netflix’s animated prequel film, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. The bottom line is, if you enjoyed the series, you’ll enjoy this movie too. It captures The Witcher’s distinct tone, reinforces its themes, and expands our understanding of Geralt’s present through Vesemir’s past. I’ve said this before: The Witcher franchise is somehow both a refreshing break from toothless sanitized fairy tales and from cynical heartless prestige television. But don’t worry, there’s still gratuitous nudity. Nightmare of the Wolf is an elegant continuation of this proud tradition, a balm for extreme times with a light touch. Heavy spoilers ahead, so unpack your childhood trauma, and enjoy one of the most endearing smooches in the history of fantasy, here are five thoughts on The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf.
1: Why Anime?
After a series of books, comic books, video games, and a live action television show, an animated movie prequel makes for an interesting addition to the Witcher Artistic Universe TM. Anime proves to be an effective platform to support the unique tone we’ve come to expect from Witcher-y content: a commitment to joy, love, destiny, and a youthful sense of fun, in a world dominated by the very worst of humanity. A mostly gray color palette is the dreary backdrop to artful violence, where monsters glide gracefully through the air to tear people into bright symmetrical blood splatter. The way Vesemir weightlessly leaps into battle elicits this feeling of ruthless optimism in the face of a depressing worldview where most of the characters are horribly killed in a petty preventable conflict. Surreal dream sequences similarly add fantastical lightness to the heavy unfairness of life on The Continent where all the villains are pitiable victims who seek to victimize others.
2: Why Vesemir?
To audience members who have only seen The Witcher television show, a movie all about Vesemir is an introduction to a character as yet only mentioned in passing, who will join the core cast in season two. To fans of the other Witcher-y art forms, this is a fresh take on an old character, a chance to see what Geralt’s grizzled mentor was like in his youth (and even in his youth, he’s seventy-years-old). A look into Vesemir’s past supports a recurring theme in the Witcher-verse: the cyclical nature of violence and monstrosity. Monsters are always representative of (if not literally embodied) socially constructed problems. Violence begets more violence, and societal ills similarly self-multiply. As his father figure, Vesemir’s childhood trauma informs Geralt’s, so understanding Vesemir’s past helps us understand Geralt’s present.
3: The Cyclical Nature of Violence and Monstrosity
Nightmare of the Wolf reinforces this theme in a number of ways. When Vesemir fought his very first monster, a demon possessing the lady he served, the monster transformed itself into his love interest Illyana. Deglan, Vesemir’s mentor, (Vesemir’s Vesemir, if you will), warns Vesemir not to let monsters get in your head. In the final battle, Tetra the witch pulls the opposite trick, making Illyana look like her, so Vesemir accidentally kills his hot septuagenarian girlfriend instead of his intended foe. Vesemir is repeatedly thwarted by emotional manipulation, which explains his turn from a carefree snarky fighter into a cautious mature warrior.
In turn, Tetra succumbs to her own tragic cycle. Her mother was killed by a witcher in the course of him scamming a priest, supporting the stereotype of witchers as money-obsessed. Tetra now accuses witchers of creating monsters just to get paid to slay them, with no evidence. Though she turns out to be correct that this is a strategy employed by Deglan and a few unsavory witchers, her single-minded fanaticism leads her on this crusade that ultimately leads to her doom. Her monstrosity is not innate, but was created by the witcher who killed her mother. We can only imagine what horrific trauma made that witcher who he turned out to be, but it was probably committed by another monster who was traumatized by another monster, etc. etc.
4: There’s No Such Thing as Ethical Monster Slaying Under Capitalism
Witchers make their living hunting monsters. As mutants, they’re feared and hated by humans, who resent relying on them to fight the scarier monsters they fear and hate even more. At times when monsters are scarce, fanatical humans become a real threat to witchers, so Deglan decides to create monsters so they’ll continue to have a useful job. The monsters he creates kill people, but like all villains on the continent, Deglan is also a victim. Money is survival, and for witchers specifically, usefulness is survival. If there are no monsters to slay, there’s no need to tolerate mutant slayers.
Continued belowEven without being an arsonist firefighter, there’s no way to slay monsters ethically under capitalism. To survive you have to charge for your services. Every sole proprietor knows if you don’t value your own time, no one else will. It’s interesting that Vesemir is the only one who chooses to be a witcher. He despised his life of impoverished servitude and chose instead to lead the life of a traveling monster slayer, an essential worker in a gig economy. Most citizens of The Continent don’t choose their path in life; they’re born into it. A choice between servitude and risking your life to become a mutant isn’t much of a choice, but perhaps this puts Vesemir in an easier position to take the moral high ground in choosing how to operate as a witcher.
5: This Time the Real Monster is… Scapegoating
Fantastical monsters are nothing compared to the societal ills they represent. This time, the real monster is scapegoating.
Vesemir sums it up nicely in the final line, “There will always be another monster.” Humanity needs an Other to define itself against. If there aren’t literal monstrosities attacking peasants in the woods, another kind of monster will be invented to focus the public’s fears. Deglan correctly intuits that witchers are next on the list of scapegoats, and in classic Shakespearean fashion, fulfills his own prophecy in trying to avoid it.
The doomed inevitability of scapegoating is part of The Witcher franchise’s bleak worldview, but whether or not you believe it’s inevitable, if you’ve lived long enough you’ll have witnessed several totally arbitrary scapegoats replace each other over the years. I’m old enough to remember when the war on terror replaced the war on drugs. Both were predicated on lies, and are now largely understood to have been (and continue to be) media-friendly euphemisms for racist ideology. Both were excuses for increasing levels of authoritarianism. Both provoked violent and lethal responses, human rights abuses, exacerbating if not creating the problems they were purported to solve.
It is a sense of relentless optimism in the face of this grim worldview that makes The Witcher a uniquely touching fantasy franchise. It doesn’t condescendingly deny that humanity’s worst instincts often prevail, but it also refuses to give in to despair. Nightmare of the Wolf is a beautifully rendered addition to a fantasy series that both accepts doom and rises above it.
