Review: ‘Autumn and the Black Jaguar,’ starring Emily Bett Rickards, Lumi Pollack, Paul Greene, Wayne Charles Baker, Kelly Hope Taylor and Lucrezia Pini

January 28, 2025

by Carla Hay

Lumi Pollack in “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” (Photo courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment)

“Autumn of the Black Jaguar”

Directed by Gilles de Maistre

Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City and in the Amazon Rainforest, the dramatic film “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latin and indigenous people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A 15-year-old girl travels from New York City with her biology teacher to the Amazon Rainforest, in order to stop animal traffickers and save the jaguar that the girl befriended when she was 7 years old.

Culture Audience: “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” will appeal mainly to people who are interested in watching corny, poorly made movies that misrepresent the dangers of untrained humans interacting with large wild animals.

Pictured from left to right: Emily Bett Rickards, Lumi Pollack (center) and Wayne Charles Baker in in “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” (Photo courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment)

“Autumn and the Black Jaguar” presents itself as a family-friendly movie, but this hokey and terrible drama irresponsibly downplays how dangerous it is for untrained humans to interact with large, predatory wild animals as cuddly pets. What’s even worse is that the movie constantly tries to make it look it’s acceptable for an underage child to put herself in harm’s way to do things that would get the child seriously injured or killed in real life. “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” is not a sci-fi/fantasy film or an animated film, which is why it’s so heinous that this incompetently made film is being marketed to impressionable children.

Directed by Gilles de Maistre and written by Prune de Maistre, “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” (formerly titled “Jaguar My Love”) takes place in New York City and in an unnamed South American country where the Amazon Rainforest exists. (The movie was actually filmed in Mexico.) Gilles de Maistre and Prune de Maistre are a husband-and-wife filmmaking duo with a pattern of doing bad movies where young females befriend wild animals. (For example: 2018’s “Mia and the White Lion” and “The Wolf and the Lion,” which was released in various countries from 2021 and 2023.)

“Autumn and the Black Jaguar” at least doesn’t advocate for large wild animals to be kept confined like domestic pets in a small house, like the atrocious “The Wolf and the Lion” did. However, “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” is still an onslaught of misinformation about animal rights activists and environmentalism. This misinformation is shoveled into this saccharine drama where viewers are supposed to think it’s cute that an underage child can play with a jaguar as if it’s a domesticated pet.

The movie’s opening scene takes place in the Amazon rainforest, where a tribal chief named Oré (played by Wayne Charles Baker) is speaking to members of his community in the fictional region of Mayarihawa. Oré says that animals in their area are being poached and trafficked. Oré also comments that there’s only one jaguar left in the area. (You don’t have to be a genius to know which jaguar that is.)

Meanwhile, in New York City, 15-year-old Autumn Edison (played by Lumi Pollack) wakes up suddenly from having a nightmare and exclaims one word: “Hope!” Autumn lives with her widower father Saul Edison (played by Paul Greene), who is a medical doctor. The next morning, Saul asks Autumn if she had “that nightmare” again. She says yes, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.

What is haunting Autumn? It’s later revealed in flashbacks that Autumn, Saul and Autumn’s mother Ellie Edison (played by Eva Avila) used to live in Mayarihawa. Ellie was an animal rights activist and a member of the same tribe that Oré now leads. Autumn spent the first seven years of her life in Mayarihawa and didn’t really want to move away.

As seen in flashback scenes, when Autumn was about 7 years old (played by Airam Camacho), one of her friends in Mayarihawa was Oré’s daughter Celya (played by Lucrezia Pinishe), who’s about the same age as Autumn. But Autumn soon finds a “special friend.” One day, Autumn is playing by herself in the forest when she sees a stray female jaguar cub. Autumn and the jaguar immediately bond as “friends.” Autumn names the jaguar Hope.

However, this friendship didn’t last when the Edison family experienced a tragedy: Ellie was murdered not long after Autumn and Hope entered each other’s lives. Saul and Autumn then moved to New York City. Saul still finds it difficult to talk abut Ellie’s death (an unsolved murder) and doesn’t want to go back to Mayarihawa. There are indications throughout the movie that Autumn also wants to become an animal rights activist.

Autumn takes her animal rights beliefs into her biology classroom, where the students are required to dissect frog cadavers. Autumn refuses to complete this assignment and calls the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) while she’s in the classroom, as a way to protest this assignment. Autumn’s prissy biology teacher Anja Shymore (played by Emily Bett Rickards) is offended by Autumn’s act of rebellion. Anja takes away Autumn’s phone during this call.

Autumn thinks Anja is a hypocrite because Anja picks and chooses which animals deserve better treatment than other animals. Anja (a bachelorette with no children) has a pet hedgehog named Kitten and is so attached to Kitten, Anja brings Kitten to work with her. Autumn doesn’t think it’s right that someone who cares so much about a hedgehog would have no problem with people dissecting dead frogs.

That’s why Autumn makes giant signs to hang on the school’s campus walls outside. The signs say “Stop Animal Abuse” and “I Am Not an Experiment.” School officials are not amused by this stunt. Autumn gets expelled for defacing school property.

At home, Saul is annoyed but doesn’t seem that surprised by Autumn’s antics because this isn’t the first time that Autumn has been expelled from a school. Autumn is grounded at home until Saul can find enrollment for her in another school. One day, when Saul is at work, Autumn discovers letters from Oré that Saul had hidden from her. Oré mentions how much he misses Autumn in the letters and says that Hope is the last jaguar in Mayarihawa, which has been plagued by poachers.

This time, it’s Autumn’s turn to be irritated with Saul. She bursts into Saul’s medical office and demands to know why Saul hid these letters from her. More importantly, Autumn wants to go to Mayarihawa to find Hope and rescue her. Saul predictably says no. But that doesn’t stop Autumn. She sneaks out of her home with her passport and a plane ticket to Mayarihawa.

Autumn, Anja and Kitten end up on the same plane together, through a series of ridiculous circumstances. The chief villain of the story is Doria Dargan (played by Kelly Hope Taylor), a greedy business owner who wants to build a dam in the area and who participates in the illegal animal trafficking in Mayarihawa. Saul eventually finds out that Autumn has secretly gone to Mayarihawa. He has a secret of his own: Saul is attracted to Anja. And you can easily guess what happens in the rest of this dreadful film.

In the production notes for “Autumn and the Black Jaguar,” director Gilles de Maistre says that Pollack spent one year getting to know the jaguar that’s in the movie. Although real trained jaguars were used in almost all of the movie’s jaguar scenes, so much of “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” is anything but realistic. The treacly dialogue is made worse by the movie’s amateurish acting by many of the cast members, particularly Bett Rickards and Greene.

Anja’s uptight priggishness is dialed up to tiresome levels because she’s supposed to be a “fish out of water” city woman who’s stuck with a rebellious teen in the Amazon Rainforest. After a while, the conflicts between Anja and Autumn overshadow everything else, while the “jaguar rescue” storyline is rushed back in the story, to eye-rolling results. The jaguar is easily the most likable character in the movie.

“Autumn and the Black Jaguar” might be acceptable to people who want mindless entertainment. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with advocating for compassionate treatment of animals—but that’s the extent of any merits this misguided movie hopes to have. “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” makes it look like all you need to be is a cute kid who likes animals, in order to charm a large wild animal into being a passive and obedient pet. And that’s a careless message to send, no matter what the intentions are.

Blue Fox Entertainment released “Autumn and the Black Jaguar” in U.S. cinemas on January 17, 2025.

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