He is also queer, the first time we’ve heard mention of queerness in the Netflix Witcher properties. Luka (voiced by Matthew Yang King), like seemingly all Witchers we’ve met, is confident, foul-mouthed, and sarcastic. Vesemir has a few friends in his training group, one of whom, Luka, makes it through with him. Only a handful survive, but it’s this ghastly gauntlet of an “education” that ensures Witchers are capable of great physical and arcane feats. It’s, well, an absolute nightmare of a process, in which boys are subject to trials of both monster-fighting and torturous magical scientific experimentation. There’s a love story there that’s central to the plot and rather well done, but the most impactful element of the movie is in its detailed depiction of Witcher training. Nightmare of the Wolf flashes back and forth from Vesimir at 70 (he’s still youthful in appearance, as Witchers age at a slower rate and can live hundreds of years) to Vesemir as an adolescent. Nightmare of the Wolf shows us how Vesemir (voiced by Theo James) got there from a hardscrabble youth, the horrors of his Witcher upbringing, and what went down to destroy Kaer Morhen and decimate its Witcher population. We’ll meet live-action Vesemir (played by Killing Eve’s excellent Kim Bodnia) in season 2, presumably when Geralt takes Ciri to the now-ruined Witcher stronghold of Kaer Morhen for training. It’s the origin story of Vesemir, a powerful, cocky, wry Witcher who later becomes young Geralt’s mentor. Nightmare of the Wolf serves as a kind of prequel to the forthcoming second season of The Witcher. This is a brutal and complicated fantasy realm based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s bestselling series of novels, further informed by the action of the popular Witcher video games and the runaway success of the first season of the live-action Witcher TV adaptation. Clocking in at 83 minutes, the plot is a bit of a mess, but most of us don’t tune into Witcher fare for cold hard logic.
The animated Netflix movie The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf is quite watchable if you don’t mind intensely drawn violence and gore.
***Many spoilers ahead for The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf***
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