- Director: Neil Marshall
- Writer: Neil Marshall
- Stars: Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd, Emma Cleasby
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 45 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/30f9Pjm
Synopsis
A young couple is camping in Scotland, and they whine about the mosquitoes. She gives him a solid silver letter opener. That night, something opens their tent and pulls the girl out. We don’t see it, but it’s clearly a werewolf. Credits roll.
We flashback two hours earlier, as soldiers pursue a man through the woods. It’s a training exercise. Captain Ryan orders Cooper to shoot their guard dog. Cooper fails the test.
Four weeks later, the soldiers are dropped off in the woods again. Sgt. Wells is in charge this time. They’re on a special training mission against the Special Forces. We get a conversation where we learn most of the soldiers’ names. Cooper tells the story of the two campers that were never found. Locals claimed it was an escaped lunatic. Captain Ryan is on the other team, watching them with his binoculars.
That night, they all sit around telling ghost stories, and it’s all fun and games until someone drops a mangled cow on their campfire. We see Captain Ryan watching things with his night-vision goggles, but something else is watching him.
The next morning, the guys investigate where the cow came from, and they discover what’s left of the Special Forces camp. It’s a gory mess. They lose their blanks and load up with real bullets. Captain Ryan is still alive, but he’s in shock from the wound. He says, “There was only supposed to be one.” One what? Ryan warns them to run for their lives before they get torn apart too. They start to hear howling in the distance.
They all run around in panic, and one guy impales himself on a tree. The werewolf gets another soldier. Sgt. Wells gets partially disembowled, but Cooper rescues him. They keep the wolves at bay with machine gun fire. They flag down a car, and the girl driver, Megan, tells them to hurry and get in. It’s tense, but the car gets away. “I heard the gunfire out there earlier. I knew that if you weren’t in trouble, you soon would be,” Megan explains.
They stop at a nearby farmhouse. There’s nobody home, but there should be. They search the house, and there’s really no one there; the fire in the fireplace and food still cooking on the stove shows they left in a hurry. The pet dog is locked in the closet.
Ryan and Wells are seriously injured, but the other four men and Megan are still OK. They discuss leaving for town, but their car has been torn apart. The men fight the werewolf trying to get in the front door while the pet dog pulls on a piece of Sgt. Wells’ intestines. When that calms down, Megan explains about werewolves to the men. They’re smart and they’re organized, but Cooper still doubts that they’re werewolves. Megan has been tracking and watching them for a year.
Cooper and Ryan have words, but Ryan won’t explain what his mission was. Ryan was fatally wounded, but he’s looking much better now. His wound is completely gone. How did he manage that? The werewolves take out the generator, and the lights go out.
The monsters finally make their move, and the bullets start flying. I’m not sure how four soldiers could possibly carry that many rounds of ammo, but they do here. Eventually, they drive off the wolves. Megan and Cooper talk about monsters, “If they’re real, what else is real? You’ve seen what lives in the shadows.” Good point.
One of the guys gets outside and hot-wires the car in the garage, but unsurprisingly, there’s one in the back seat. At some point, Sgt. Wells gets out of bed; he’s feeling better now too. Megan knows Ryan from his first visit. Ryan explains that he works for the Special Weapons Division, and they were assigned to capture a werewolf and bring it back alive. Wells and his men were expendable— they were bait. Hearing this, Wells punches Ryan, which triggers him to change. They all gang up on him, but he bursts through the window and escapes.
After seeing Ryan change, they all start watching Wells really closely. He knows it himself. Megan explains that there’s no way out now. This is her house, and she’s been a werewolf all along; she was just holding it in. She just let the other werewolves in. There’s an intense, claustrophobic battle, which culminates with Wells changing into a werwolf, but as he does, he cuts the gas line and blows up the house.
Cooper survives, but then he runs into werewolf-Ryan, and they fight. Cooper finds the body of the dead camper, along with his silver letter opener. He stabs Ryan with the silver knife, and kills him.
Commentary
It’s always nice to see a werewolf film set in modern times. You always have to wonder how well certain types of monsters would fare against a well-armed military force, and here we get exactly that. The werewolves win, almost every time. Good thing regular bullets and blades only slow them down.
It’s mighty lucky that there was a silver knife that ended up in the bone-room of the wolves. It’s even more convenient that Cooper found it and knew what it was.
The acting here is really good. The accents are a little hard for American ears to follow sometimes, but not too much. Kevin McKidd, Liam Cunningham, and Sean Pertwee all got much bigger roles after this but were not super well-known prior to the film. The creature effects are great here, but I found the overuse of shaky-cam annoying. Still, I definitely recommend this.