‘Wildcat’ Review: Rescue and Rewild

When the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton described the ocelot in his unfortunately titled encyclopedic tome “Lives of Game Animals” (1925), he understandably waxed poetic. Its beautiful coat, he wrote, “is the most wonderful tangle of stripes, bars, chains, spots, dots and smudges.” He likened some markings to “black sausages” (he was, after all, British), while noting that others looked “as though they were put on as the animal ran by.”

Ocelots are among the smaller wildcats — they average 28 to 35 pounds — and among the most ridiculously cute. Jayne Mansfield had one as a pet, as did Gram Parsons; Salvador Dalí had two. Even with protections, ocelots have it tough and are driven from their territory by deforestation and captured for the pet trade. In 2016, a month-old ball of ocelot adorableness from the Peruvian Amazon was headed to a zoo or worse when he was rescued by a young American ecologist, Samantha Zwicker, and her British partner, Harry Turner. They named the kitten Khan and embarked on a project to reintroduce him back into the wild.

The documentary “Wildcat” tracks Zwicker and Turner’s rewilding endeavors, charting both their peaks and anguished lows. Such reintroduction initiatives are heroic and painstakingly difficult, requiring expertise, resources, enormous patience and a certain amount of basic luck. What made the Khan project more daunting, Zwicker says, is that no one had spent a year or more with a wildcat that was then reintroduced: “It’s just never been done.” Zwicker seemed well-equipped: She has a lifelong interest in animals, several degrees (she’s a Ph.D. candidate in quantitative ecology), and had already founded an environmental nonprofit, Hoja Nueva, in southeast Peru. Yet raising Khan was another order of magnitude.

“Wildcat” is the first feature movie from Melissa Lesh and Trevor Beck Frost, who have backgrounds documenting conservation work: She directed the short movie “Person of the Forest,” about orangutans in Borneo; he is a former photojournalist. As you might expect, “Wildcat” features a lot of handsome imagery of Khan climbing trees, scampering through the forest and chasing after prey that sometimes bites back. Some of the reintroduction techniques are not for the squeamish, as when Turner encourages Khan’s predatory instincts by shaking what looks like a mouse at the kitten, exhorting, “Come on, get it!” (It escapes.)