A documentary by Crystal Moselle. Rated PG. 

Home-schooling isn’t just for whacked-out bible-thumpers anymore. In The Wolfpack, that concept is taken to extremes by a messianic Peruvian immigrant and his unusually passive American wife.

In an odd stroke of filmmaking luck, documentary producer Crystal Moselle stumbled upon an odd sight: six brothers with long black hair, dressed like the guys from Reservoir Dogs, rolling down a street on New York’s Lower East Side in one of their first-ever group outings. She had the wherewithal to ask who they were and the result led to her shooting their story over the next several years, as an overly tight-knit unit gradually came unravelled.

The literal key to the story is in the pocket of Oscar Angulo, a music-minded Hare Krishna from Peru, who managed to dazzle a mousy Midwestern girl called Susanne into travelling with him and, eventually, into having 10 children modelled on Krishna’s sons. Named Govinda, Bhagavan, Mukunda, et cetera, the brothers dubbed themselves “the Wolfpack” once they got their shades and dark threads.

The family stopped at seven, and as with the Hindu god, nobody talks about daughters. Two of the boys are twins, adding to visual confusion, and they have a developmentally challenged sister who is hardly glimpsed.

The mother still seems in thrall to the man who dragged them to New York and locked them in a couple of stuffy, run-down rooms. From what we gather, Oscar was a ruthless tyrant until he turned into a negligent drunk with no power.

“Some things you just don’t get over” is as close as the eldest boy comes to an explanation, but we do notice that they no longer talk to their father. For a control freak, he was pretty lax on their entertainment: no Internet, but plenty of movies on VHS and DVD, and they got into staging, dressing, and shooting scenes from their favourite Tarantino and Oliver Stone flicks.

One wonders how their childhood might have differed if they had a stack of Truffaut and Bergman films instead, but this mysterious, unsettling, and slightly disorganized tale ends on a high note, with the pack starting to create their own stories, both on-camera and off. It’s worth leaving the house for.