Wild Nights, Tamed Beasts
In a rapidly changing society, the night stretches on and the inner beasts seem to await the dawn. The protagonist, Ye Xiaolin, a former assassin turned caregiver, enters an environment dedicated to the elderly under the apparent guise of assistance. There, beneath the mask of care, she commits acts that shake the balance; but when she crosses paths with Ma Deyong, a livestock specialist marked by loneliness, the order of things begins to crack. Meanwhile, Detective Zhou Ping investigates a trail of mysterious deaths. In this interweaving, old age, violence, care, and dignity reflect upon one another in a drama that goes beyond crime, becoming a social meditation on the passage of time and the fragility of human bonds.
Man is an animal that gets used to everything, even his own prison.
— Emil Cioran
— Emil Cioran
It is not merely a thriller: it is a pilgrimage into the shadow that each of us carries within, and an invitation to view old age as a terrain for reflection on our being-for-time. With peaks of visceral tension and almost silent pauses, the film interrogates the concept of “care” in an era where the elderly—physically declining, socially often marginalized—become the testbed of our humanism.
In Wang Tong’s work, the act of caring is not only an external action but also a confrontation with mortality. Ye Xiaolin moves through corridors and rooms where time has already consumed form; and in her ambivalent role—both perpetrator and potential redeemer—the question arises: what does it mean to assist another?
The violence Ye commits is not gratuitous: it is an extreme gesture, a symptom of a deeper discomfort that speaks to our inability to stay with the marginalized, the invisible. But when the inner beast intersects with care—embodied by Ma Deyong—a space of tension opens where redemption, or at least acknowledgment, seems possible without ever being fully resolved.
The film also touches on demographic themes, on an aging society, while simultaneously asking: what happens to a culture that cannot treat those who have lost physical strength and visibility with dignity? How do we care for memory, and how do we accept that every human being is a receptacle of history, failures, and silences? Wild Nights, Tamed Beastsmakes us feel the weight of existence through time: not only our own time but that of others, which we often ignore.
Euthanasia… is simply the possibility of dying with dignity, at a moment when life itself has already lost it.
— Marya Mannes
— Marya Mannes
Aesthetically, the film alternates moments of claustrophobic tension with meditative silences, as if the camera wishes to linger on every face, every crease of skin, every mark of time. In these suspended spaces, there is a beast to tame, the fear of becoming useless, the anger of being forgotten, the hope of still being loved. And so the wild night within Ye Xiaolin finds a counterpoint in the fragile humanity of Ma Deyong, leaving us, the viewers, to question what it means to live, to care, to wait.
In the symbolic language of Wild Nights, Tamed Beasts, the lion in a cage is perhaps a figure of immense poetic and ethical power. It represents, above all, repressed vital energy, the primordial force that modern society—with its rules, institutions, and control structures—constantly attempts to contain. It is a metaphor for the drive for freedom imprisoned within moral conventions, but also for restrained violence, which in Ye Xiaolin manifests as an inner conflict between instinct and compassion.
On an existential level, the lion embodies constrained human dignity: that of elderly people confined in care homes, of those living on the margins, of those “tamed” by life. The cage thus becomes a symbol of the modern human condition, a prisoner of one’s fears and social roles, unable to express one’s authentic nature without violating the rules of civil coexistence.
In other words, the caged lion is not only Ye Xiaolin—or the elderly she assists—but all of humanity: wild by nature, civilized by necessity, perpetually in tension between desire and discipline, freedom and survival. The cage in Wild Nights, Tamed Beasts can be read as a metaphor for life itself—not as punishment, but as an ontological limit: the condition that keeps us in the world, shapes us, and simultaneously restrains us.
Life is a cage because it defines us and confines us. It forces us to confront finitude, time, and the need to adapt. It is the structure that delineates the field of our possibilities, but also what makes any experience possible. Like the lion, we are trapped in a form, a body, a destiny we did not choose—but within that imprisonment lies our only chance for freedom: awareness.
In this reading, the film suggests that one never truly leaves the cage, but one can learn to observe it attentively. Ye Xiaolin, with her moral ambiguity, embodies this gesture: she does not try to escape, but seeks to understand whether, within the prison of her existence—made of guilt, memory, and desire—an authentic, human, living act is still possible.
Thus, the cage also becomes a figure of being, as Heidegger might say: not man’s prison, but his inevitable dwelling.
Through the way the camera lingers on long, silent interior spaces—often lit with cold or artificial light; through the rhythm alternating sudden agitations with long, nearly static moments; through the visual design of the sets—all elements evoking more an “exhibition” than classical narrative—the film seems to present itself not only as a story, but as a visual and sonic “exposition” of an existential state.
One could say the viewer moves through a gallery: the rooms of the elderly, the zoo cages, the semi-abandoned building, the spaces of fractured relationships are moving tableaux, compositions in which bodies—the caregiver, the livestock specialist, the lion—become “objects” in a space that is both domestic and exhibit-like.
From this perspective, the cage is not only metaphorical but a physical element: the camera almost contemplates it like an art installation that challenges us, makes us look—look and feel—the unease, the waiting, the passage of time. This “installation” style reinforces the message: we are not mere spectators of a crime or social scandal, but witnesses to a system that monitors, contains, and shapes life. At the same time, it invites us to perceive the visual as a space for reflection—as art that does not “tell” but “presents” an experience.
The soundtrack by Ding Ke contributes profoundly to this effect: it does not merely “accompany” the action but amplifies silent tension, the presence of absences, the precariousness of moments. Each note seems suspended, each silence measured like a breath pause in the corridors of mind and time. The music, wonderfully unsettling, functions as a fabric that unites scene and metaphor, making them all part of a sonic space where the wild is restrained, the human exposed, and time becomes space.
Thus, when the film assumes the aspect of an installation, the soundtrack becomes an “environmental” element: not just a score, but an acoustic field in which the visual and auditory merge into a unique, contemplative, and above all immersive experience.
It is not death that frightens us, but the possibility of finding ourselves still alive when we are no longer so.
— Marguerite Yourcenar
— Marguerite Yourcenar
This movie was in the official competition of Rome Film Fest