Director: Jordan Downey
Year: 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Werewolf
Plot:
Working on a new case, a forensic examiner trying to uncover the strange life of a corpse brought in learns it’s the father who abandoned her years ago and disappeared, forcing her to find out the truth regarding what happened as the gradual reveal slowly puts her in danger.
Review:
For the most part, this was a rather strong and effective genre effort. Among the better factors of this one is the incredibly strong and likable setup that manages to focus on the intriguing premise as well as some incredibly fun genre qualities. This is in part due to the incredibly intricate main storyline, starting initially with the procedural investigation of the strange case before her when a body is brought in containing a slew of strange wounds and other unnatural conditions that allow her to show off the skillset she has at combing through the evidence left behind to deduce who it was and what happened. That serves well enough to establish how good she is at the whole thing, and the reveal of him being the long-lost father she never knew, and how everything he forced upon her is bubbling back to the surface with the investigative angle of looking into who he really was and why he’s come back into her life.
That slow-burn style in the first half flips in the second half as it starts to make sense of the answers she’s gotten from the work on the body. The monstrous reveal of everything, and the series of scenes focused on the idea of whatever creature he’s being turned into coming into play with the incidents that follow, give the storyline a great payoff, moving into a vicious series of incredibly fun creature attacks. Given the amount of realistic, prosthetic work done on the monster used here where the crackling limbs, distorting proportions and general monstrous design come together here with everything looking quite impressive. The attacks that result are quite brutal and bloody, using the impressive creature design to get quite a lot to enjoy overall here.
There’s not much to this one that holds it back, but it does have a few minor issues. The main issue here is that the whole thing takes way too long to get going, as the majority of the first part here involves a series of investigative work done on the various bodies and the mystery that comes about, describing the strange body and the mysteries that come up at the expense of the horror elements. We see a great deal of the informative work done on the bodies, talking with her superiors, and trying to clear up the nagging questions that emerge once she starts to focus on the possibility that it’s her father and what happened to him, leaving this with an engaging and immersive mystery without much in the way of genre content happening. It leaves this slightly too long and more reliant on building the atmosphere instead of action, so that this can struggle to get going for some, but otherwise, there’s not much to bring this down.
Overview: ****/5
A really strong, if slightly sluggish, genre effort, there’s a lot to like with this one that manages to keep this going really nicely at the expense of several minor flaws that keep it down. Those with an interest in this style or approach, or who are curious about it, will have the most to like here, while those turned off by these factors will want to heed caution.
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