I like werewolf- and vampire-movies who dares to be special. How wants to be something else than just another horror movie. Wer won’t win any prizes for originality, but it’s a refreshing breeze of gory mayhem which dares to stand out a bit compared to the PG13 films out there. Because if you make a werewolf film it needs to be violent. It’s stories about the animal inside, the primitive part of us who loves the rage and the hunger. Or as in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, a symbol for either puberty or homosexuality. No matter what the werewolf myth says about us, the humanity, it’s a monster that almost every time delivers good entertainment.
I’ve only heard bad things about the director’s earlier film, The Devil Inside, so of course I was a bit skeptic regarding this - also counting it was dumped on home video without any fanfare earlier this year. But good reviews sprung up like shrooms after a rainy day on an autumn field, and I got more curious. It started a bit awkward, mostly because the German release have translated all the news graphic in the beginning of the film, which for a moment made it feel like a German film. An odd thing to do, I thought they only dubbed (aka destroyed) the films over there. But after those brief failures the film transformed into a thriller:
A team of defense lawyers and experts working on the case - who is Talan Gwynek, the man accused for murdering a family in a forest outside Paris? They dig deeper into his history and family and can it be he’s a werewolf, a real werewolf? With a set of genetics which makes him become a monster, a hairy monster. Of course shit hits the fan soon, after he escapes and takes on the police force and every human being in his path!
First of all, I’ve read several reviews where the writers are referring Wer as a found footage film, and the director himself calls it a “faux-documentary style project” in an interview, but I can’t honestly see it’s either. There’s some footage that’s take from a home video camera, some surveillance cameras and POV cameras on SWAT-style teams, but the rest… well, it’s have a documentary style, but very discreetly. There’s no cameras together with the characters, and there’s a lot of scenes where a camera team never could be able to film. My guess is that it started as a fake footage film, and then they scrapped that idea but kept the visual style.
Wer is a damn good little film. The actors, except the dude playing the wolfman, Brian Scott O'Connor, feels pretty uninterested in what they’re doing and the first half feels a bit distant, cold. Not sure how to explain it. But after we see more of Talan, a huge and tall hairy guy, it takes shape into a very intensive and action-packed horror film. The violence here is sadistic and graphic, with a lot of people getting smashed into pulp in front of the camera. Gore and blood all the way, without trying to be a splatter movie. Check the semi-boring and semi-underrated The Wolfman from 2010 for a visual reference of the violence. The monster is more human than wolf, but feels a lot scarier - and a lot grumpier than usual.
This film walks the line between generic and unique, but I think the only way for people to really, really dislike it is to listen to other people who says it’s bad. You know, like most people do. It must be hard to have no opinions of your own. But still, this film got better reviews than I expected it - considering the laziness of today’s film critics. One thing is for sure, it’s a lot of fun and brings with it some atmosphere and gore into our homes. I for one welcomes that!
Oh, and here’s a thought about the word “werewolf”. Sometimes we apply “wer” on other beings, like a “werebear” or “weredeer” etc, which means a bear or a deer is a monster. Why the hell do we call humans who are these monsters for werewolves? Shouldn’t we be werehumans? Just sayin’. Or askin’. Whatever.
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