- Directed by Stig Svendsen
- Written by Espen Aukan, Stig Svendsen
- Stars Liv Mjönes, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Arthur Hakalahti
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sxnOLRGkhw
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It starts out with the Vikings and quickly hops to modern Norway. Where a story with a lot of similarities to “Jaws” unfolds. Only with a werewolf. It was actually quite good, with lots of creature action, good acting, and a script that was entertaining.
Spoilery Synopsis
In 1050, Vikings brought twenty ships to pillage Normandy and they found a wolf cub behind a locked door, and they took it home. None of the vikings returned home. Credits roll.
One thousand years later, in modern Norway, Thale tries to sneak beer out of the house to her boyfriend Jonas. Arthur wants her to call him Dad, but she won’t do it. Thale admits to her friends that her mom is a cop and that she killed someone at their old home. The kids tease Thale about being a murderer, but she’s heard it all before. Night falls, and one young couple is attacked and dragged into the woods as Thale watches. A wolf howls in the distance.
The mayor’s daughter is missing, and the boy is in shock. Liv comes to the police call, on duty, and Thale tells her what happened. Liv finds a big claw embedded in a tree. After questioning everyone, Liv and Thale talk about her dead father; Thale is still bitter. Liv wants the police force to go out hunting for wolves, but the chief says they have more important leads to follow up upon.
They eventually find Elin’s body, and it’s a clawed-up mess. The coroner doesn’t think this looks right as a wolf attack. Thale goes back to the scene of the attack and hears someone calling her name.
At the university, the professor sends William, an animal expert (veterinarian), to help identify “Our wolf,” as the professor calls it.
That night, a man breaks into the morgue and looks at Elin’s body. The next day, the same one-armed man, Lars, comes to the police; he’s the predator hunter. He tells Liv that they’re looking for a lycanthrope; he’s been hunting these things for his entire life. He calls it a “werewolf,” and Liv thinks he’s a lunatic. “The bloodline must be broken!” He insists, and he also shows her a box of silver bullets– he gives her one.
Thale has a wound on her shoulder that no one’s really mentioned before. She tells Liv that it’s fine. She starts feeling ill in the morning. Her hearing starts getting hyper sensitive and she freaks out in class. She gets several visions of Elin, who blames her for her death.
William arrives and looks at Elin’s body. He says that the thing Liv found is definitely a wolf claw even though it’s unusually large, so Eilert the boss gets a hunting permit. Liv, the cops, and local hunters go up into the mountains hunting. They find another body, an asylum seeker. Eilert, the sheriff, has a panic attack, so Liv takes over. Two men are left to guard the body, but they soon find themselves under attack.
She then enters a mine shaft alone, but the thing is huge and bottomless. She finds yet another body down there. The police outside the mine are killed next, all except Liv, who comes face to face with the werewolf. She shoots it full of lead, and then, in desperation, reloads with the silver bullet, which does the trick.
Liv wakes up in the hospital, and the mayor makes her the new sheriff. “It’s all over now,” the mayor says. That night, Thale’s little deaf sister, Jenny, sees Thale standing outside and goes to investigate. Thale’s in shock, so Jenny leads her back inside.
William does an autopsy and tells Liv that the eight lead bullets didn’t do a thing, but it died easily from the silver bullet. “It’s almost like a chemical reaction.” It’s also missing the claw that Liv had. William thinks it really is a werewolf. She goes to see Lars, the old one-armed man. Lars has all the old lore, and he’s hunted it all over Europe. He also explains about a bitten victim’s gradual transformation. “When the curse is completed, the human is lost. The bloodline must be severed. The bloodline is severed, right?”
Liv isn’t so sure about that; she knows Thale was wounded. That evening, Thale and Jonas are making out at the lookout, and she looks up at the full moon and starts to moan. She grows fangs and yells at Jonas.
Liv gets a call in the morning. Thale wakes up in the shed and coughs up a piece of Jonas. She still has fangs. William examines Jonas’s body and says the teeth are smaller– this isn’t the same wolf as before.
Lars goes to see Eilert in the hospital. He’s got a wound, so the old man pulls his life support plug. Night falls, and Thale is on a bus out of town when she starts to grow long claws and even bigger fangs. The other passengers on the bus soon take notice, and that goes badly for some of them. All the various characters hear about the attack on the radio and head to the tunnel where the bus stopped.
Liv arrives on the scene first, and there are bodies everywhere with some people fleeing the scene. Liv tells William that the werewolf is her daughter. He says he has enough tranquilizer that they may not need to kill Thale.
Thale, on the other hand, goes home. She sneaks up behind her deaf sister. Arthur jumps in and tries to electrocute the werewolf. They run out into the car, which Arthur breaks the window with his hand and drives away. He crashes due to blood loss from his hand.
The werewolf goes on a rampage in town, killing several people. Jenny follows it and talks to Thale using sign language. William shoots it with a tranquilizer, but it still chases them into a store. Lars arrives and rams it with his truck. Lars doesn’t live long after that.
The werewolf finishes with Lars and then bites Liv’s arm as William scrambles for more tranquilizer. Jenny ends up stabbing it with a dart, and it passes out.
The next day, Liv looks at the big animal in the lab and pulls out her gun, the one with the silver bullets…
Later, we see Liv leaving the police station and driving home. She sits next to a photo of Thale, and next to that is an unused silver bullet. Is that a werewolf wound?
Commentary
The similarities to “Jaws” are too many to count. The sheriff, the grizzled old hunter, and the college veterinarian are ripped straight from there, along with several segments of the plot (We got it! No wait, that’s a different one!).
The werewolf visuals are late in the film, but pretty decent, mostly CGI, but OK in most scenes. There aren’t any great surprises here, but seeing a werewolf movie shot in Norway is very interesting and makes this different enough to be worth a watch.
There were a lot of attacks in this film. Did none of them get bitten? Was Liv injured by the bite at the end? Did she or didn’t she shoot Thule? We have many unanswered questions.