Review: The Ancient Woods Is a Meditative Ode to a Lithuanian Forest’s Wildlife

The best nature documentaries tap into a fundamental appeal of the moving image: the use of the camera as a prosthetic eye that take us to ecosystems inaccessible to most humans. As the Planet Earth series attests, this capacity has only been enhanced in the decades since the advent of smaller digital technologies. Even though cameras are so ubiquitous that one would think everything under the sun has been recorded, the sight of wild animals and insects living their lives outside the purview of any apparent human witness can still carry immense wonder—though it’s perfectly possible, a la March of the Penguins, to dampen this wonder by transforming nonhuman creatures into cuddly mommies and daddies.

No such unduly anthropocentric framework distorts Mindaugas Survila’s The Ancient Woods, a poetic but unpretentious depiction of the wildlife in an old-growth forest in Lithuania. Lacking an overriding desire to turn the locale’s crows, spiders, snakes, bovines, and other creatures into humanlike protagonists, though, doesn’t mean that the film lacks for a primary framework. In fact, it opens and closes with a contemplative view of the nighttime sky, suggesting, as a glance up at a canopy of stars often does, the expanse of time that exceeds the human scale of things but still conjures the birth of planets and the development of lifeforms.

These paralleled images seem to indicate that deep time, the grand narrative of non-human history that shaped the world, can be sensed within the Lithuanian forest. One gets the impression from Survila’s patiently held long takes—of badgers building dens, of a translucent green spider stretching to capture a tiny fly, of a lone wolf peering aimlessly around a clearing—that this is the way things have always been, at least as far as any mortal could know. These animals with their peculiar adaptations, like the crows that tug at the hind feathers of a giant falcon in order to sneak a bite of its hearty carrion meal, are themselves a product of time, of the persistence and gradual diversification of life through countless generations.

Survila often relays his awareness of the ancientness of the forest with a portent-diffusing sense of humor, as conveyed in an early scene of the crows trolling the falcon, or a later tight two-shot of a pair of cranes looking around and occasionally letting loose a white stream of shit. Some other fowls later chow down on a nest of frogs, a scene of carnage that Survila devilishly undercranks so that we can witness the gnashing beaks demolish the amphibians in granular detail. It’s an uncanny sight, but one made more disconcertingly amusing than abjectly horrifying by how pointed Survila makes his intention to gross the viewer out.

At times, we’re invited—or perhaps merely tempted—to construct miniature narratives out of what we see. At one point, a snake with black-and-white marbled scales slinks toward a rodent that not only seems unbothered but even blithely tempts fate by investigating the reptile with its nose. The snake strikes, but the rodent recoils, only to stay close by, observing, as if morbidly curious about this strange creature that wants to kill and eat it. A cut to what we can infer to be a shot taken later in the day shows the rodent ensconced in underbrush, unmoving, its bulging eyes poking up above the leaves. Do we see it trembling slightly, showing the trauma from its recent brush with death, or is this an anthropocentric projection, a facile interpretation that the cut is playfully dangling in front of us?

Such ambiguities are what preserve the sense in The Ancient Woods that any conventional meaning to be found in the lives of these creatures would necessarily have to be imposed from the outside. There’s a pure observational quality to most of the other sequences that play out between the framing gazes up at the stars, whether we’re tucked into the chestnut-filled hovel of a field mouse or following a giant centipede as it crawls up a tree trunk. In the “ancient” old-growth woods, Survila also finds the original promise of the movies: to bring us somewhere where we aren’t, and probably could not be, but nevertheless feels tangibly real.