“Wild Inside” is an enchanting movie, and a haunting one too. It’s a documentary about Flaco, the owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo and spent a year living in the wilds of New York City. Since that story was widely covered when it happened in 2023, turning Flaco into an international media sensation, you might think: Why do I need to see a documentary about it?
The answer is that Penny Lane, the gifted director of “Wild Inside,” has told this tale in a revelatory way, building it like an imagistic storybook from the ground up. From the moment that Flaco, on the evening of February 2, 2023, first appeared on a sidewalk near the corner of 50th St. and Fifth Avenue, standing there as still as a statue, he was surrounded by people filming and photographing him — civilians on their phones, then nature photographers, amateur and professional. Working with the editor Hannah Buck, Lane uses their endless archive of images to craft a true-life nature fairy tale. “Wild Inside” feels like the vérité version of the greatest children’s novel E.B. White never wrote.
As you watch the movie, Flaco becomes a true character, though there’s nothing cute about him, and the film has a philosophical ambiguity that takes you by surprise. It’s a movie about freedom and captivity, but it doesn’t have a simple or reductive message. Flaco, who lived in the Central Park Zoo for 13 years, escaped when someone cut the wire mesh on his cage. He was a Eurasian eagle-owl, a species that doesn’t exist in America, and when you look at him, he really is the living incarnation of the classic, mythological…owl. He’s stunningly beautiful, with big orange eyes set inside a regal head, and a body of tan and black and orange feathers that makes it appear that he’s wrapped inside the most luxurious comforter on earth. His wingspan is awesome (nearly six feet wide), but when Flaco is just standing there, which is most of the time, he does indeed look wise and inscrutable. To know what’s going on in that head, you have to read his actions.
The day after he made his first appearance on that midtown sidewalk, Flaco flew to Central Park and lodged himself high up in a tree near the south end of the park, just opposite the Essex House. What would happen to him? Representatives of the Central Park Zoo planned to recapture him, and they set about the task armed with mosquito nets, trying to tempt Flaco with food — the dead white lab rats he had eaten every day for 13 years. But Flaco wasn’t interested. He just stayed up in that tree. How would he survive? Tentatively, then with more confidence, he began to fly down into the park and hunt the real live New York City rats that roam there. His muscles grew stronger; his predatory instincts came to the fore. Within two weeks, he was living like a wild animal, though one who was so accustomed to being around humans that he had a way of standing on a branch as if it were his throne. The Central Park Zoo people gave up on trying to capture him.
It’s only natural that the story told by “Wild Inside” triggers our liberal impulses. We think: Yes! Flaco is alive in the wild! He’s in a better place. The movie taps into what’s noble and valid and genuine about those feelings. Some of us actually have an aversion to zoos. Personally speaking, from the earliest age, I couldn’t stand them. I found staring at wild animals in captivity to be inexpressibly sad. Flaco is the animal hero who triumphs over the system of “benign” incarceration, becoming the apex predator of Central Park. And the more he thrives, and gets elevated to a kind of critter superhero status (Seth Meyers on his late-night show: “Every New Yorker dreams of moving out of their tiny shitty apartment into a nicer neighborhood. And Flaco Shawshanked out of that cage and did it!”), the more he becomes a symbol of what freedom means. After a number of months, he moves from Central Park to the East Village, and then to the Upper West Side, where we see him standing on air conditioners, and at times on elevated stone carvings in a way that’s very Batman. Residents will encounter him perched on the air conditioner just outside their apartment, staring in.
From the outset, however, there are warnings in the other direction. Within a week, Flaco had triumphed over the doubters who feared that an owl raised in captivity wouldn’t have the strength or stamina to survive in the outside world. Yet it isn’t quite that simple. There have long been owls and hawks who live outside of zoos in New York, and there’s a fate that awaits them. They eat rats and mice, and in doing so they absorb the rodenticide that’s in the bodies of those creatures.
Should Flaco have been recaptured and returned to his tiny environment within the Central Park Zoo? In the documentary, several knowledgable observers say that that would have been the most humane scenario — that had it happened that way, Flaco would be alive today, and would likely have lived for another 30 to 40 years. The probability of that is indisputable. What’s haunting about “Wild Inside” is that it inspires us to root for Flaco’s freedom, for the fullness of his life, in the spirit of “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Yet the ending that he comes to haunts us as well. He dies one day, out of the blue, by colliding into the wall of an apartment courtyard; that’s because his strength had been weakened by the rodenticide. What was the right choice? Maybe there was no right choice. “Wild Inside” is so moving because we’re stirred by the creature Flaco was, and it’s the story he lived that made him that creature.
