This New Film Observes Patrick Wolf’s Rise, Fall and Rebirth

“I have to be very grateful for the film,” says Wolf of Christian Cargill’s new feature starring Tilda Swinton, which mixes present-day scenes with archive footage, illustration and clips from cinema. “Christian has helped me close a book."

As dawn breaks on the south Kent coast and crashing waves muffle the shriek of seagulls, the first words we hear in Wolf are those of Tilda Swinton. “It’s been a long time since we last saw each other,” she remarks off camera, gently addressing her friend – and the film’s subject – Patrick Wolf. Their ensuing conversation forms the framework for director Christian Cargill’s tender portrait of the rise, fall and creative rebirth of one of pop’s most enigmatic outsiders.

Emerging in the early 2000s with a sound that fused baroque instrumentation and electronic experimentation with a mix of folklore, fairytales and ancient mythology, Wolf was never an artist easily contained by pop’s conventions. From the feverish theatricality of his 2003 debut Lycanthropy and the orchestral grandeur of 2011’s Lupercalia, to his commercial breakthrough on 2007’s The Magic Position, he carved out a reputation as one of British music’s most unique voices, only to retreat from the public eye entirely between 2012 and 2023.

The film pieces together the fragments of that lost decade – a period marked by addiction, financial ruin, grief and unresolved trauma – and contextualises them as part of his wider life story, mixing present-day scenes filmed at his home in Ramsgate with archive footage, illustration, clips from cinema and imagery from the natural world. The effect is impressionistic rather than exhaustive, with the human story prioritised over delivering a comprehensive overview of Wolf’s career.

“I had no interest in making a fan film whatsoever,” says Cargill, speaking from Canada ahead of a screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival. “It’s a film about struggle and hope and resilience. He just happens to be a musician as part of that journey.” 

Cargill sees the film as part of the same lineage as his previous shorts, the BAFTA Cymru-winning Heart Valley – which documented a day in the life of a septuagenarian sheep farmer – and Recomposing Earth, which told the story of Orkney composer Erland Cooper’s buried album project. “All of my films are essentially people looking for home,” he explains. “Heart Valley is about someone who’s found home and has never left, Recomposing Earth is about someone who has left home but always feels connected to it, and then with Wolf, it’s about Patrick re-evaluating what home is.”

Raised in Wandsworth, Wolf lived in London until 2019, when he relocated to Ramsgate as part of his recovery. Cargill captures the restorative rhythms of life by the sea: Wolf running along the coastline at dawn, tending to his garden, decorating his studio, writing beneath the sound mirror at Broadstairs and swimming at sunset in Botany Bay. These quiet rituals feel a world away from the technicolour chaos of his years in London.

For fans, the amount of previously unseen archive footage included in Wolf will be a delight. Indeed, Cargill recalls being handed “a shoebox featuring over 50 hours of footage”, featuring home videos shot by Wolf’s father as well as by members of the performance art community, including Susanne Oberbeck of No Bra. Using his experience overseeing archive footage on the 2022 music documentary Meet Me In The Bathroom, Cargill pieces together Wolf’s whirlwind journey from his roots in experimental art collective Maison Crimineaux to his tenure as a successful solo artist, assembling a collage of clips, artefacts and photography. Threaded through this archival patchwork, the off-screen conversation between Swinton and Wolf serves as a narration of sorts, lending the film an intimate and reflective quality. 

It was Cargill’s idea to reunite the two, who had first met when Wolf invited Swinton to play the voice of hope on his 2009 album The Bachelor, and had latterly lost touch. Wolf recalls initially feeling some trepidation at the reunion, simply because of the painful nature of the subjects they would discuss.

“There’s a part of me that has really wanted to come back to work and not have to talk about the past at all,” the 43-year-old sighs, speaking from his garden studio. “But with Tilda, there was so much compassion and empathy. We were meant to only talk for 45 minutes and we ended up talking for six hours.”

Swinton’s significance in Wolf’s life runs deeper than their friendship: growing up, he was hugely inspired by her depiction of gender fluidity in Sally Potter’s 1992 film Orlando, making Cargill’s decision to intercut footage from the film all the more poignant. “Orlando was a life changing film for me,” Wolf smiles. “If I had seen a career advisor at that age, I would have taken that film in and said, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’”

But while Orlando offered Wolf a vision of a world beyond conventional ideas of gender and identity, the reality of growing up gay in Britain was considerably less liberating. The film explores the hostility he faced living under Section 28, from the violent bullying he endured at school and his subsequent expulsion, to the homophobia that followed him into adulthood. As his career took off, sections of the press seized on his “flamboyance” as a means of diminishing his talent, reducing his musical ambition and artistic ingenuity to a caricature of excess. The film lays bare the toll of that relentless scrutiny, tracing how a culture hostile to queer expression shaped both the artist Wolf became and the struggles he would spend years trying to overcome.

“I found the first edit really disturbing and painful to watch,” he reflects. “All the work you’ve done during psychotherapy and all the meetings are suddenly dredged up. With some of the footage my first reaction was like, “Can you take that out?” And then I walked around the block in my head, and realised that’s probably the reason why it should be in the film: it’s important I’m uncomfortable.”

This trust-fall approach extended to commissioning the film’s original score, which was created by the Oscar-nominated composer Owen Pallett. “Our relationship has been so many things over the years, from collaborators to lovers to great friends, and I knew he had a very specific idea of what songs he does and doesn’t like. So I left him alone to watch the film, to choose whatever songs he wanted from my catalogue, and to create a portrait of me with my music, but in his composition style.”

Pallett’s tender, orchestral arrangements lend the film an added emotional depth. One particularly poignant passage, featuring Wolf reflecting on the depths of his addiction, is set to a haunting reimagining of Demolition from his debut album. It’s poles apart from the buoyant maximalism of Wolf’s better-known work on The Magic Position, a record that will turn 20 next year. In some respects, working on the film has helped Wolf make peace with that album, allowing him to revisit the record with a renewed perspective and reconnect with a body of work that has long been difficult to separate from the experiences that followed.

“I forget how young I was when I made that,” he says, shaking his head. “And it’s a really brave and insane psychedelic album, you know? To think that [the title track] was in and out of the charts; a song which is basically made out of bass clarinet, a children’s toy piano and an Alan Lomax sample, and which discusses divine magic and geomancy. The amount I had to fight in order to get that across the line, and then to get dropped for it. I have a lot to be proud of for that record.”

He continues, “I think for a long time I lived in a lot of regret. You know, with all the opportunity that was thrown at me, why didn’t I flourish more? Why didn’t I rise over this hurdle? Or why didn’t I handle that situation better? But I was forced to forgive myself, and to realise I was just doing the best that I could at that time. So really, I have to be very grateful for the film, as Christian has helped me close a book.”

Wolf will premiere at Barbican on 22 October