Penny Lane’s documentary follows Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo in 2023 and became an international media fascination while living in New York City. The review finds the film moving and unsettling because it turns familiar footage of the owl into a reflective story about freedom, captivity and the ambiguity of returning a long-confined animal to the wild.

Flaco had spent 13 years in the zoo before someone cut through his enclosure’s wire mesh, allowing him to escape on 2 February 2023. With an almost six-foot wingspan, he initially drew crowds and photographers before settling in Central Park, where zoo staff unsuccessfully tried to lure him back with the dead laboratory rats he had been fed in captivity; instead, he began hunting live city rats.