In Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, healing is mutual. This quietly powerful documentary from director Pippa Ehrlich (My Octopus Teacher) tells the improbable but deeply moving story of a traumatized man and an endangered pangolin forging a bond that reshapes them both. Beautifully shot and emotionally disarming, it’s a film that doesn’t just tug at your heartstrings — it quietly reconfigures them.
Kulu is a Temminck’s pangolin, also known as a scaly anteater — one of the most trafficked mammals on Earth. Captured as a baby by illegal poachers who sought to sell his keratin-rich scales for use in traditional Chinese medicine, Kulu is malnourished and frantic when he’s discovered during a sting operation. His rescue is only the beginning. Returned to the wild too soon, he likely wouldn’t last a week. Instead, he’s brought to South Africa’s Lapalala Wilderness School, where he’ll require constant care, physical rehabilitation, and emotional reassurance before being reintroduced to his natural habitat.
Enter Gareth Thomas, an ex-poker player whose life once centered around high-stakes games, personal loss, and aimlessness. Now serving as a volunteer pangolin walker, Gareth doesn’t just tend to Kulu — he commits to him. With the intensity of a new parent and the humility of someone seeking redemption, Gareth leads Kulu to anthills, carries him through long grasses under threat of predators, and even sleeps outside his burrow for weeks to provide a sense of safety and companionship. Gareth refers to himself, without irony, as a helicopter parent. In context, it doesn’t feel overblown.
The documentary leans into its sentimentality without apology, but it earns every soft moment. Ehrlich knows how to film intimacy without force, capturing the quiet rhythm of the bush, the subtle shifts in Gareth’s gaze, and the rhythmic rustle of Kulu’s armor-like scales as he shuffles through the underbrush. There are no bombastic monologues or heavy-handed appeals. Instead, brief, illuminating voiceovers by ant expert Dr. Caswell Munyai provide cultural context and ecological insight. In some African traditions, pangolins are believed to hold spiritual power. Watching Kulu coax Gareth into gentleness, patience, and emotional vulnerability, that idea doesn’t seem far-fetched.
Though Pangolin is undeniably a nature documentary, it resists the genre’s usual formula. There’s no emphasis on statistics, and the conservation message comes through action, not lecture. What emerges is something deeper — a testament to what happens when care replaces conquest, and when survival becomes a shared mission. In the end, Kulu doesn’t just find his footing in the wild. Gareth finds something too — purpose, connection, and a reason to keep showing up.
In a world that often feels hostile and transactional, Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey is a quiet reminder that connection, even across species, can be transformative. If you’re lucky, it might even be contagious.
Final Score- [7/10]
Reviewed by - Neerja Choudhuri
Follow @NeerjaCH on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times