One of the most effective and horrific werewolf films in recent years is also one that has gone to great lengths to hide what it’s about. The marketing for The Cycle, which dropped on Shudder just in time for this month’s full moon, doesn’t even hint that it’s a monster movie or that the monster in question is a werewolf, but would I be covering it here if it wasn’t? (This, by the way, appears to be a localized phenomenon, because the film’s German and Lithuanian posters put the werewolf front and center.)
The first half of The Cycle plays like an extended riff on the moment in many werewolf movies where police are investigating a crime scene and one asks, “What kind of animal could have done this?” To that end, co-writer/director/editor Jordan Downey makes his protagonist a forensics anthropologist who’s reluctant to help out with a case that’s brought to her because one of the bodies is her long-absent father, who left her and her mother high and dry some 34 years earlier.
Introduced looking over a cold case file from 1973, Dr. Megan Garland (Deborah Ann Woll) is visited by police chief Ian Marks (Will Hochman), who brings her in to get a second opinion on the body of Peter Stump, which was found near the scene of a double homicide but is in an extremely curious condition. Her preliminary autopsy shows his ribs and bones have been broken and mended dozens of times, “if not more,” and a subsequent examination of the deceased’s skull leads to this exchange between her and her assistant: “Are those fractures?” “Like his head ruptured from the inside out.”
The reasons for this are obvious to anybody who knows they’re in a werewolf movie, but Megan doesn’t until well after the hour mark, when the w-word is first spoken out loud. For those willing to wait that long, their patience will be rewarded with an entirely practical transformation (carried out by make-up effects designer Patrick Magee and his crew) that ranks alongside the greats. Downey and his co-writer Kevin Stewart are also aware of the implications of surviving an attack by such a creature, as when one of Ian’s injured deputies (Jack Doolan) asks, “What does that mean for me?”
As a film where intergenerational drama is built into the narrative, it’s notable that Ian’s father (Jeffrey Donovan) is also on the force and had a contentious relationship with his father, who was a cop as well. Meanwhile, Megan and her mother (Gretchen Corbett) are barely on speaking terms, but such concerns are quickly brushed aside when there is a vicious, drooling werewolf on the loose.