Viking Wolf (2022)

It opens with a Hellboy-esque backstory told all three of visually, voiceoverly, and textually. Blah blah, vikings stole an imprisoned hellhound from monks in Normandy and brought it back to Scandinavia, where it spread lycanthropy. Presumably, nobody noticed in the last thousand years because the wolves mostly roamed in the Sami regions, and nobody talks to the Sami. In Netflix Nordic Noir tradition, it's blue-tinted and desaturated, and littered with pans across beautiful Nordic scenery between scenes.

Some small-town Norwegian high school kids go to a party in the woods and pretend they're in fucking-jävla-kuk-Åmål. It doesn't last long before three of the kids are attacked by an unseen beast and one of the girls is dragged off into the forest. Our main girl, Thale, gets scratched on the shoulder. The cops find a badly mangled corpse a few days later. Thale's mom is the main cop, and does not recuse herself due to conflict-of-interest despite her daughter being central to the investigation.

As is Scandinavian film tradition, the teenage daughter is extremely pissed at her mother because her parents got divorced, and they're both awful at level-headed communication. They manage a nice shot of a bathroom shouting match, with the mom's face neatly framed in the little makeup mirror. Thale speaks Norwegian and her mom speaks Swedish.

Thale's sister is deaf and they communicate via sign language, which I swear is a trope in recent movies, but I can't actually find a single other film where this happens to maybe I just made that up. The sister is absent for nearly the entire film, until the end when they use her as a prop during the climax in an attempt at a heartfelt nature-of-the-beast philosophical pondering.

A one-armed, RV-driving Swedish guy enters the mom's office uninvited and tells her he has information about the murdered child; it was a lycanthrope, he says, and its family line must be terminated. She calls him an idiot, and he gives her a box of silver bullets on his way out. He gets quite a lot of screen time for somebody whose only contribution is providing the plot-necessary silver bullets.

The cops call for help from the closest university, which sends down an excitable young wolf expert. He confirms they have found a wolf claw, though unusually large. The town decides to go on a jolly little wolf hunt, but they find a decapitated corpse first. They leave half of the hunting party behind to guard the corpse, a normal thing to do in a horror movie, while the rest go explore a nearby cave. A big, 100% CGI wolf kills everyone except Thale's mom, who manages to stop it just in time with her one silver bullet.

The university guy does an autopsy on the wolf corpse, which looks better in stuffed prop form than in the CGI animations. He finds that the normal bullets that struck it did nothing, while the silver bullet blasted a massive hole through it. Also, the claw it lost has been replaced by a human fingernail. They wander down to the one-armed man so he can read out some backstory to them/us. This is a world where a bitten human transitions into permanent killer wolf, as opposed to merely once a month, after infection.

Thale starts feeling funny, picks up super-human hearing in the middle of class, and hallucinates. She goes to the toilet to hallucinate more. She starts sleepwalking at night. She goes on a date with her boyfriend, the moon comes out, and she eats him. She vomits out a finger when she awakens in her garage. The cops find the corpse quickly, and the university guy observes that the bite marks come from a "smaller animal."

Thale hops on a night bus to Oslo without telling anyone. It's the night of the full moon, and she wolfs out in the back; a mostly, but not entirely CGI experience. She eats several of the passengers. Her mom comes to investigate, finds her daughter's clothing littered across the bloody bus, and quickly accepts that the werewolf is her daughter. All of the lights go out in the motorway tunnel for no reason besides dramatic effect.

Thale returns to her home, still in wolf form, and her stepdad tazes her with a lamp. It sparkles with fake CGI electrical arcs, knocking her away. The CGI wolf runs around town eating high school boys who slighted her in previous scenes, while her sister struts around in dramatic slow motion in an attempt to defeat the beast with the pure-familial-love. We have prior evidence that this technique doesn't work.

The cops trigger another chase scene instead of just killing the wolf, to extend the climactic ending, by shooting it with a tranquilizer dart that does exactly nothing. The one-armed man shows up to accidentally suicide in an illogical way that also serves to extend the ending. Thale bites the ever-living shit out of her mom's arm, which doesn't seem to do much. Her deaf sister stabs her with another tranquilizer dart, and the wolf falls asleep instantly this time, shedding a single tear as it closes its eyes. The mom raises a silver-bullet-loaded-pistol to her wolf-daughter's head. Can she bring herself to do it? Who cares?