New York City has nearly 8.5 million residents, and though it often feels like one is sharing a rush hour subway with a large percentage of them, the truth is that we know so few of our fellow citizens. High rises and condo buildings are cropping up every day; glancing at these ever-present walls of windows, one can’t help but wonder: who’s in there? The assumption being that you could, at any moment, find out, when the inhabitants step out for work or to pick up a carton of milk at the corner deli. The Wolfpack introduces us to one NYC family where just such an encounter was unlikely to happen – until very recently.

The title refers to the Angulo family: mother and father, six brothers and one sister, all living in an East Village apartment. Their lives are defined by father Oscar’s unusually strict (and perhaps legally dubious) rules: the boys are not to cut their hair, which is waist-length when the film opens; “working” in the traditional sense is not allowed, as it makes one a “slave to society”; and, most importantly, the children are not allowed to leave the house. As mother Susanne explains, she grew up in the Midwest, and the neighborhood where they live is “not very good;” she homeschooled all seven children and faced most of the same strictures, though she later comments that she likely had more rules. For the Angulos, everything beyond the immediate family was always safely outside and viewable only from the apartment windows.

But there was one other “window” onto the world for the Angulos: the movies. From a collection of “5,000” VHS tapes and DVDs, the Angulo brothers watched a version of reality unfold, all while remaining within the same four-bedroom apartment. They created elaborate costumes from household items and reenacted lengthy sequences of their favorite films. In interviews with the director, the older boys talk about their growing recognition of and frustration with their situation, which culminated on a day in 2010 when Mukunda, the third oldest of the brothers, donned a homemade Michael Myers mask and stepped outside. Though this first excursion led to a short period of hospitalization for Mukunda and regular therapy for his brothers, it also opened the door (literally and metaphorically) for the entire family. The documentary picks up at a point in the family’s life when the boys take day trips to Coney Island, oldest brother Govinda has moved into his own apartment, and Mukunda is working as a production assistant.

The story of the Angulo family is inherently compelling, and one can’t help but revel in the voyeuristic satisfaction of seeing into not just any NYC apartment, but perhaps one of the strangest apartments in the city. Comparisons have been made to the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, about Big and Little Edie Beale, eccentric Onassis relatives relegated to an isolated existence in their crumbling Long Island mansion. Over the years, viewers have questioned whether Grey Gardens was exploitative; such concerns are fairly unlikely to plague The Wolfpack, primarily because while the film is similarly categorizable as cinema verite, it has a narrative with a fairly satisfying “positive” conclusion. The question then arises: to what extent has the film itself intervened and contributed to this particular narrative’s realization? And does it really matter – can anyone argue against the results?

The filmmakers’ intervention becomes explicit when Susanne calls her own mother on the cell phone and is recorded telling her, “You sound the same as you did 50 years ago,” and explaining that she now has seven children. Presumably she was given the cell phone by the filmmakers, and perhaps made this rather significant (and heartbreaking) call on their prompting. While Grey Gardens includes moments when the Edies communicate directly with the Maysles, reminding the audience of their presence, director Crystal Moselle and her team are almost never referred to directly. Interviews with Moselle always begin with a discussion of how Moselle met the Angulo brothers, whether they were open to discussing their life immediately, how willing a participant Oscar was, and so on; this could be a reflection of a certain feeling of incompleteness that the film leaves behind. It is somehow easier to grasp that the odd relatives of successful, wealthy people would build a strange, otherworldly existence for themselves hidden from the public eye, and would perform that existence rather automatically for a passive camera.

Contributing to this sense of an open-ended narrative are the many home videos included in the film; inserted under descriptions of Oscar’s abusive tendencies and recollections of the darkest aspects of their upbringing, the amateur performances and videoed self-portraits take on a sinister and rather heartbreaking quality. The camera, likely wielded by one of the Angulo brothers, holds on a close-up of Oscar and one of his children, staring expressionlessly back; it is as though the father needs the movies to recognize his own existence, just as his children need them to create whatever existence they can. Oscar comes across as a violent and jealous tyrant, ruled by his own fear of the threatening forces just outside his door – a villain which the film presents apparently without judgment, or at least as he presents himself.

The Angulo brothers are surprisingly articulate, self-aware, creative and empathetic – characteristics that may come as a surprise; by the conclusion of the film, it feels as though we have been only just introduced to remarkable people, and perhaps the feeling of incompleteness is an expression of the desire to spend more time with them. In a particularly beautiful sequence, the brothers, lit by television screen and sheathed in colorful scarves, dance and lip-sync along to Toto’s “Africa;” it is as though they are providing the celebratory musical-breakdown typical of a fiction film. They are the protagonists of the movie they are building of their own lives, and The Wolfpack offers a sweet and beguiling window into that process.