Josh Rubin’s Werewolves Within laces an old-fashioned scenario, in which people hole up in a spooky mansion and are preyed upon by one of their own, with de rigueur nods to the political tensions plaguing America. The film’s governing joke, which isn’t a bad one, is that even the people of a small, seemingly cut-off town are adopting the trendy cultural discourses of our polarized social media age. In other words, there’s no escaping the noise.
Throughout, the kooks of the New England town of Beaverfield are conscious of how they appear to their neighbors, and they’re constantly referencing matters of race, social status, gender, left- and right-wing predilections, and sexual identity. The town appears to be populated by about a dozen citizens, and they each represent a different quadrant of American society. Most are glibly defined, but intentionally so, as Rubin and screenwriter Mishna Wolff understand that the media tends to define people by their easily recognizable differences.
Among others, there’s an anti-government gun nut (Glenn Fleshler), a racially mixed gay couple (Harvey Guillén and Cheyenne Jackson) whose liberal politics are rendered hypocritical by their insulated wealth, an eccentric and overly obliging caretaker (Catherine Curtin), a gas industrialist (Wayne Duvall) indifferent to the effects of his trade on the environment, a handsy husband (Michael Chernus), and a feminist mailperson (Milana Vayntrub) who’s constantly dodging men’s condescending come-ons. The most vividly defined character in the film, though, is its hero, Finn (Sam Richardson), an African-American park ranger living in an otherwise all-white town who’s wrestling with issues of self-assertion. He’s too nice of a guy, almost as if he’s over-correcting for society’s resentments to the point of self-effacement, and Richardson imbues a potentially cute caricature with a subtle sense of real pain.
Werewolves Within’s mixture of cartoonish characters with horror-movie tropes recalls Ron Underwood’s Tremors and Edgar Wright’s more visceral class parables. The actors have energy, but with the exception of Richardson, Vayntrub, and Fleshler, they don’t transcend the fact that the screenplay’s purposefully reductive writing is still, well, ultimately reductive, as well as wearying after a while. Werewolves Within ambles along, punctuated with variable one-liners and with little at stake, and considering the evocatively creepy mansion and snowy small-town atmosphere at its center, the film often seems all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Snowed in, with the community’s generators slashed by a killer who could be a lycanthrope, Finn is charged with keeping the various stereotypes from killing one another, yet the tensions between them never quite combust as they do in a Wright film, and the jokiness doesn’t quite intensify the horror, as it did in Joe Dante’s The Howling and Jim Cummings’s recent The Wolf of Snow Hollow. Yet Werewolves Within nevertheless offers a pleasant amble with amusing actors in archaic settings, and the film shifts gears and becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch. And the solution to the werewolf mystery is satisfying and surprising, underscoring even the fundamentally decent Finn’s biases. Like many tortured beta males, he longs for a storybook romance of acquiescence, missing the ax-grinding wolf in babe’s clothing, hiding in plain sight.
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