Werewolves Within (2021)

The first werewolf film of WOLFtober to open with a Mr. Rogers quote and be based on a video game, it sticks to the basics and opens with some guy being torn apart in the woods by an unseen beast.

Our hero, an excessively unconfident and mild-mannered park ranger played by Sam Richardson (the guy I always think is Kenan Thompson at first glance), comes driving into Beaverfield, the tiny, backwater Vermont town he has just been transferred to. He checks into the local inn, which is also where most of the other characters live.

It's another Clue-like werewolf murder mystery, so we're introduced one-by-one to all of the townsfolk and their various interpersonal conflicts. Each is a one-dimensional archetype with one easily explained reason for hating the rest of the town, so each can be trivially accused of being the werewolf.

Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows hams it up with an American Horror Story regular as the flamboyantly gay couple. There are some meth-y mechanics, and evil oil baron, a crazy crafting housewife, a lonely innkeeper with a missing husband, a mysterious scientist, and the loner trapper who lives in the woods.

The ranger awkwardly flirts with the mail girl, who is also awkward. She takes him on a tour around town to introduce him to all of the characters. They form the main investigatory pair.

The humor is generally based on sarcastic, socially maladjusted millenials behaving slightly awkwardly, which they generally do very well. There is a fully-formed story, which is formulaic but executed well enough, but all of it is just a structure upon which to hang the conversational comedy.

During a big snow storm, something destroys all of the town's electric generators. All of the townsfolk move into the inn, so make it easier to have an authentic Clue experience. They find the innkeeper's husband from the first scene, now a frozen corpse, and it becomes a murder investigation.

They all assume the loner trapper is responsible, but the scientist finds wolf hair, says it's definitely an animal, and starts acting suspicious.

Something eats one guy's hand in the middle of the night, so the trapper theory is out of the window and they start trying to figure out who or what is in the inn with them. The scientist shoots herself to death under highly suspicious circumstances.

There's a whole lot of talking where they each blame each other and/or defend each other in circles, and then they all split up and leave the inn. They get picked off one-by-one, not necessarily all by a werewolf.

There turns out to be more than one enemy. Just as well, there turns out to be more than one hero. There's only one werewolf, but they're all taking advantage of it to advance their own motives. The werewolf has also been planting and manipulating clues all along. Unlike in The Beast Must Die (1974), this film actually was cleverly providing clues to the viewer about which one of them is the werewolf, and you can spot it very early if you're up to speed on your very rarely mentioned werewolf lore.