If the embed won’t play, the trailer is also here on YouTube.
There is a pleasing irony in Stephen King, author of Cycle of the Werewolf, lending his name to a werewolf picture called The Cycle that has nothing whatsoever to do with his 1983 novella. No matter. King called Jordan Downey’s film “special” on social media, and the trailer quotes him likening it to The Thing crossed with The Silence of the Lambs, while Mick Garris, who knows a thing or two about adapting King, applauds its practical effects. It arrived on Shudder on 23 October, comfortably in time for Halloween.
Deborah Ann Woll, Karen Page in Marvel’s Daredevil and Jessica in True Blood, plays Meg Garland, a forensic anthropologist who runs a body farm where FBI agents learn how corpses decompose in different conditions. It’s a cheerful line of work, and it becomes a great deal less cheerful when the body of her father, missing for 36 years, turns up at the scene of a horrific crime. Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice co-stars, alongside Will Hochman, Jack Doolan and Gretchen Corbett, whom viewers of a certain vintage will remember as Jim Rockford’s long-suffering lawyer Beth in The Rockford Files.
The werewolf was presumably meant to stay hidden for a while, but the marketing let it out of the bag some time ago, so we don’t feel too guilty mentioning it. Critics who caught the film at Fantastic Fest in September describe a patient, Fincher-ish procedural, all murky blue-greys and lingering close-ups of evidence, that gradually reveals itself as a full-blooded practical-effects creature feature with some genuinely fresh ideas about lycanthrope lore. Fangoria’s editor went so far as to tell readers to watch it before opening the magazine’s coverage, which is about as warm a recommendation as horror journalism offers.
Downey’s career path is a peculiar one. He started with ThanksKilling (2008), a deliberately ropey romp about a foul-mouthed killer turkey, before graduating to the grim, mud-caked monster-hunting of The Head Hunter (2018) and the “Stork” segment of V/H/S/Beyond. The leap from homicidal poultry to slow-burn seriousness is considerable, and the early notices suggest he has made it. The recurring grumble is that the script, which Downey wrote with his regular cinematographer Kevin Stewart, gets a touch heavy-handed with its musings on fathers, fate and coincidence, and at 111 minutes it asks for patience before it bares its teeth.
Werewolves have had a thinner time of it on screen than vampires or zombies, too often reduced to a bloke in a moth-eaten suit or a CGI dog that looks as though it was rendered on a pocket calculator. The ones that last, from An American Werewolf in London and The Howling to Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, earned their place by taking the change seriously. If The Cycle lives up to its notices, it may well join them on the shelf. Leave the porch light on, and check the calendar for the full moon before you press play.
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