Whispers in the Woods review – paddling in the moonlight in tender study of human-animal interaction

Director Vincent Munier takes his father and son into the Vosges forest in France and finds lynx, serene foxes and deer

Cannily timed to overlap but also contrast with the BBC’s Blue Planet III, this French nature documentary embodies a very different way to go about things. Instead of the detached, friendly style of David Attenborough with his generous sprinkle of zoological facts and figures, Whispers in the Woods is a more emotionally driven, visually stylised work that emphasises the interaction of the human and the animal realm.

Its director, Vincent Munier, previously made The Velvet Queen, a swooning study of his and writer Sylvain Tesson’s search for snow leopards in Tibet. This time round, Munier places his father Michael, a naturalist, and his own teenage son Simon at the centre of the action; we experience the film largely through Simon’s bright eyes as Michael teaches him about the ecosystem in the Vosges forest in eastern France. The result is a subtle, tender work that evokes the need to pass on interest and engagement in the natural world to younger generations, but which manages to avoid feeling too preachy or sanctimonious. It helps that the soundtrack, composed by Nick Cave’s key collaborator Warren Ellis, consistently evokes a wistful sense of awe with its sighing strings and keening voices, all of which meshes beautifully with the soundscape of the beasties we see here. (It isn’t called Whispers in the Woods for nothing.)

The wildlife on show is less exotic than the snow leopards of Tibet, but is no less entrancing to watch: the wary lynx we meet padding over to collect his prey from the night before, the serene foxes, and deer going for a paddle in a river in the moonlight, along with all the birds whose calls and cries Grandpapa Michael can identify in an instant. Unlike a typical BBC documentary with its emphasis on high-speed cameras to create slow-motion wonders, Munier loves to get very arty with shots where the animals aren’t even in focus. Instead, they’re sometimes just fuzzy shadows beyond the pine needles, as if this were a nature doc directed by Lotte Reiniger, the silent era pioneer of silhouette animation. And yet the style doesn’t feel mannered: it’s more like the recreation of a walker in the woods encountering the creatures themselves on a wintry day. Lovely stuff.