In the Lovely Wild Inside, Flaco the Owl Gets His Documentary

For the year or so that he captured New York City’s imagination, Flaco the owl came to represent a lot of things. For some he symbolized freedom: Initially on exhibit at the Central Park Zoo, he’d escaped his enclosure and resisted attempts to lure him back. Once it became clear that he was able to hunt on his own, feeding on street rats and other critters, the zoo stopped trying to recapture him, since he’d proven he could get by in the big city. (“If I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere …”) A Eurasian eagle-owl and not native to North America, Flaco was also the classic outsider who’d made the city his home. When he started looking for a mate, unaware that there were no other Eurasian eagle-owls anywhere near New York, he embodied the city’s loneliness. If Paul Schrader wrote talking-animal movies, he might have written one about Flaco the owl. 

Luckily we also have Penny Lane, a documentarian who specializes in oddball individuals and communities (Our Nixon, Nuts!, Hail Satan?), and she makes for an ideal chronicler of Flaco’s tale in all its poignant layers. While it began with curiosity and often expressed itself as solidarity, the story of the city and the owl was ultimately a sad one. In February 2024, Flaco collided with a building, and an autopsy revealed all sorts of junk in his body, including rat poison and pigeon herpes. Getting poisoned by your environment, death by drugs and concrete … these too can be New York stories.

Like a lot of tragedies, Wild Inside is a tale told by witnesses: the ordinary citizens and activists and wildlife photographers and others who followed the owl around the city as he fluttered around Central Park and then spread his wings farther, expanding his territory across Manhattan’s rooftops and ledges and fire escapes. Lane gets their interviews, but she also has footage of them on their searches, as well as their discoveries. Their delight — their rapture — at seeing the owl suggests that for some, the quest has become a spiritual one as well. Spotting Flaco doesn’t just mean that they’ve located the owl, it also means the owl and his penetrating eyes have found them, like the drifting gaze of a previously indifferent god.

Lane elegantly juggles the many different perspectives on Flaco, the scientific and preservationist impulses as well as the inevitable anthropomorphism and dreamy symbolism. She finds in the bird’s journey plenty of hope as well as caution, while her playful filmmaking keeps things moving along entertainingly. Flaco’s tale might have ended grimly, but this is (mostly) a fun movie. But Wild Inside is also at its best when it centers on the people, on the ways that everyone chose to define themselves in relation to the bird. The story is at once poetic and delusional and solipsistic and beautiful. Flaco as a shooting star of liberation and self-actualization, a creature who experienced freedom for one year before a sudden death, is about as Romantic as it gets. It’s also as New York as it gets: In the end, we couldn’t help but make it about ourselves.