When Animals Dream (2014)

Based on the dramatic music and slow pans, we're supposed to be increasingly concerned about the small rash growing on a young fish monger girl in this highly desaturated Danish town. Some movies succeed spectacularly in nurturing suspense via slow focus on the mundane. This is not such a film. At the ten minute mark, they've already achieved a full hour's worth of boredom.

Marie doesn't like people or places or things or her job, so she mopes around staring at people and saying very little. So, like a Danish Sometimes I Think About Dying with a werewolf mystery twist, except not… you know, good. In the first, highly-skilled actors manage to tell a complex story through body language and facial expressions. Here, less-skilled actors manage to waste our damned time. People aren't silent here because they're expressing deep emotion or providing dramatic effect; they're silent because if anybody was able to communicate worth a damn the whole plot would fall apart.

Marie spies on her parents and finds her dad shaving her mom's back, and then has some flashy dreams about blood and tattoos and stuff so you, the dear viewer, will start to wonder what's going on, if you, the dear viewer, haven't already lost so much interest from the halibut-themed plot device that a few disjointed werewolf attack visions can no longer restore it.

After a misguided halibut-based rape scene, her own rash starts growing long hair, which upsets her so she drops too all fours and growls.

It's fair that she doesn't like her job, since she more-or-less works at that fish factory from eXistenZ. There is only one kind person at her job, who we know is the love interest because he smiles and offers her a cigarette and neither of them say anything.

The doc comes by to tell her that actually they know what she has, because her mentally-absent disabled mother has the same thing. They tell her to take medication and she declines, because it would be devastating to the story. It's more or less the plot of Teen Wolf (1985), except as a moody Nordic noir.

She runs off and breaks into an old steamboat for some reason, where she finds slowcore music, environmental jumpscares, werewolf clues, and some flashy visions. This segues dumbly into her running over to the only nice guy's house to take him clubbing and then for a long walk on the beach before they hook up. I guess they thought it would be easier to do the whole love interest subplot at once rather than a slow drip. They have sex and she pulses with werewolfery.

In the morning, the doc and her dad try to restrain her and force her to take medication, so her mom suddenly wakes up and eats the doc. The dad immediately reverses position and helps them bury the corpse. He makes a remarkably invisible grave in no time at all.

The townsfolk immediately notice the doc is missing and come to the house demanding to see the mom naked, so apparently they all know she's a drugged up werewolf. Everybody at Marie's work immediately distrusts her, even though they have no new information since the last scene. It seems the characters are getting confused about what they know versus what the viewer knows.

They find the mum drowned in their bathtub after work, which we don't know how to feel about because the mum hasn't really been a character up until this point. The music seems to indicate we should be stressed about it. The townsfolk show remorse to the dad and stare menacingly at Marie, who, as far as they know, doesn't even know what's going on. And, for the most part, she still doesn't. Her fingers start bleeding while at her mum's funeral, and she probably doesn't know why.

The townsfolk decide to lynch her, but initiate it by throwing rocks at her and then having a slow-speed moped chase, which she wins by jogging slowly and then casually eating the only one who almost caught her. This is no time to escalate things, though, so the pacing slows right down and there are several scenes of slowcore music while people look at things and shuffle items around.

Her boyfriend betrays her and lets the townsfolk sneak up on her in a barn, kidnap her, put her on a boat, and motor her out to sea. She escapes and eats each of them one-by-one, but somehow fails to generate any excitement while doing so. The boyfriend finds her on deck when she has eaten everybody else, some dramatic Titanic-esque music plays, and they hug until the sunrises over the blood-drenched bow. They don't know what to do now, so they take a nap and fade to credits.

Wikipedia says it has been compared to Låt Den Rätte Komma In, which you can certainly do. They're both slow Scandinavian films about young supernatural monsters. One of them, however, is fantastic, while the other is boring and full of halibut. Wikipedia says it has also been compared to Ginger Snaps, which don't have anything more in common than containing a teenage girl, so maybe we shouldn't put stock in what online movie sites compare things to. Well, you can put stock into what this movie site compares things to, which is Lycanthropus (1961), because they both have girls and werewolves and are a boring waste of two hours.