After winning a writing competition, she travels to New York to get approval from a publisher for her novel, Wise Blood, but refuses the request that she outline her work. She discusses her novel with Robert Lowell, who describes O'Connor as his most talented student and with whom she has mutual romantic feelings (though Lowell eventually marries Elizabeth Hardwick, whom O'Connor meets at a writers' party where she does not get along well with other guests).
Coming back from New York, she feels tired and has facial rashes; she learns she has lupus, of which her father died. She refuses to see a doctor for a while, but finally gets treatment for the illness. Eventually she needs to use crutches, at one point falling down the stairs. Her mother Regina, who occasionally demonstrates her racist prejudices, tries to help and support her, even if she does not always enjoy Flannery's writings and sees them as abrasive. Flannery buys a peacock for herself as a comfort.
An Irish priest counsels her about her internal struggles; she mentions James Joyce's Ulysses being banned in Ireland, which he agrees is needless. When O'Connor describes her difficulties to be a good Catholic, the priest recommends she do acts of charity and use her writing for that purpose. After receiving a letter from Lowell about his marriage to Hardwick, Flannery settles into a life of concentrated writing.
The film ends with an intertitle shown before the closing credits to inform the viewer that O'Connor continued to live for another fourteen years, eventually succumbing to what she called "the French wolf" (lupus). The final on-screen text after the credits is her quotation about her gratitude to thousands of pigs whose pituitary glands were used for making the lupus injections that kept her alive.
In January 2024, Oscilloscope acquired US distribution rights to the film.[12] It was released in limited theaters in New York and Los Angeles on May 3, 2024.[13]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 58% of 76 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The website's consensus reads: "Wildcat brings careful craft and solid acting to bear on an admirable idea; unfortunately, it still struggles to present a compelling picture of a brilliant author's inner life."[14]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 55 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[15]
