Harry Turner in Wildcat. Photo: Trevor Frost, Prime Video

WILDCAT
Directed by Melissa Lesh and Trevor Frost
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

HARRY Turner was a teenager in the British Army.

A few months after completing his basic training, he was posted to the front line in Afghanistan – and the experience of war had the impact you can imagine on his young conscience.

Suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress, he was medically discharged.

Back home, there was no magic wand and life did not improve: he self-harmed and tried to take his own life.

This documentary tells his story – and how immersing himself in the Amazon, he hoped he could start to come to terms with what he had experienced and find ways to process that in a way that is not destructive.

Turner travelled to a wildlife rescue and rehab centre in the Peruvian jungle, run by Samantha Zwicker: she too has had a troubled time, her father an abusive alcoholic for whom she grieves.

Turner is given the job of looking after a baby ocelot – think a mini leopard – and we follow their journey together as he tries to keep his new charge safe without out forming an attachment that would mean the creature cannot later be returned to the wild.

So far, so straightforward.

But this is no happy-clappy narrative. It avoids cliches and does not try to over cook what the pair have gone through, or their hopes to find a sense of redemption by helping animals in such a wild and remote place.

And this is no straightforward love story, either – the couple’s relationship, the troubles they have seen, and the stress of the circumstances they find themselves in mean the viewer cannot be assured there’ll be a sunset for them to head off in to.

It soon becomes clear that it’s not that easy.

Having watched children die in Afghanistan, the hope that the jungle may provide some solace is hopeful but as we see, misguided.

We watch how Turner attempts to train an ocelot – fascinating – but for a person with so many problems, his obsession with the cat and his relationship with Samantha is not ever easy.

Perhaps the most important idea running through the story is that no matter how far you travel, how far you remove the person from what is perceived to be a toxic environment, you can never run away from yourself, and any problems you may have had at home travel with you, wherever you settle.