Viking Wolf Review: Horror That Always Leaves the Bloodiest Parts Off-Screen

Cast: Liv Mjönes, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Arthur Hakalahti, Sjur Vatne Brean, Vidar Magnussen, Kasper Antonsen

Director: Stig Svendsen

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

The newest international film in the Netflix catalog is Viking Wolf, which shows a kind of scary mix between the ancient and universal myth of the werewolf with Norse mythology. In the end, it still shows a mother’s sacrifice in favor of a city and all of humanity. Monsters and creatures of all sorts in Norway have seen many on the big screen. After all, the Nordic world and the Norse legends are an inexhaustible reservoir from which to draw. Yet in the fantastic and horror cinema of cinematography, something was missing from the appeal and that something is the werewolves. This explains the interest of lovers of the genre in the latest arrival at Netflix, namely Viking Wolf, presented as the first real film about werewolves shot in those parts, released on February 3, 2023, on the stars and stripes platform. To sign the direction Stig Svendsen, here in his fourth attempt at the feature film, also wrote the screenplay together with Espen Aukan.

The partnership between Netflix and Nordic cinema continues with another piece of Norwegian popular cinema, which arrives directly in streaming after its domestic release. A situation that means that a large part of the public will never see what, regardless, are the best twenty seconds of any film distributed in Scandinavia by the major SF Studios, i.e. the company intro. Everything else remains, which is what we’re talking about in our review of Viking Wolf, described by subject matter experts as the first werewolf film ever made in Norway. This is the fourth work by Stig Svendsen, who returns to horror more than ten years after Elevator, who practiced the genre with deliberately reduced means inside an elevator.

Viking Wolf Review: The Story Plot

The film is the story of Thale, a seventeen-year-old who moves to a small town because of the work of his mother, a policewoman of Swedish origin. A situation that is already not particularly exciting for the young woman, and which will become even more complicated when a mysterious creature begins to wreak havoc in the region, especially targeting Thale’s peers. She, the only witness to one of the killings, becomes a key element of the police investigation. In theory, a wolf is being hunted, but some clues suggest something more sinister: a werewolf, a beast whose disease has spread from generation to generation from victim to victim, starting in 1050 when the Vikings come into contact with the first specimen.

Viking Wolf Review and Analysis

At the acting level, the operation revolves above all around the complicated relationship between mother and daughter. In the first case, we are dealing with Liv Mjönes, a Swedish actress who has repeatedly made herself appreciated in her homeland and has also acquired a certain international profile, albeit always in the Nordic sphere, acting for Ari Aster in Midsommar in the role of one of the members of the pagan community visited by American protagonists. The young Thale is instead the first leading role for Eli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, who has established herself in Norway in recent years with secondary parts in important projects such as Utøya: July 22, about the 2011 attack, and Hope, based on the real experiences of director Maria Sødahl (wife of well-known filmmaker Hans Petter Moland, whose screen alter ego was her best friend Stellan Skarsgård). Together, the two actresses create a solid bond that gives proper sustenance to the dramatic component of the film, net of the “sabotage” carried out by marketing (which treats the identity of the wolf nonchalantly, whereas the film itself builds a mystery around it).

The Fenris wolf is talked about in a sequence at school as if it were the Nordic equivalent of an American teen series (or the cinematic version of a show like Ragnarok, which transformed Norse mythology into adolescent fantasy). And yet, the mythological aspect is almost completely irrelevant for a film that above all intends to show how Norwegian cinema knows how to manage the effects component for a work centered on werewolves, and from that point of view, except for some shots where the CGI falters a bit, work is impeccable. But the suspicion remains that, although it was a project conceived for the big screen, there was a minimum of mentality linked to platform exploitation behind it, since there are all the algorithmic elements that in theory, the average Netflix user likes: the gendered premise, the European/Nordic factor, the young faces, all mixed conventionally for minimal entertainment.

And so it is, with little effort but a lot of passion, and the promise of potentially interesting evolutions now that the “Viking wolf” has been cleared as a creature to be exploited on the screen. Opened with the inevitable explanation of how the creature came to hide and claim victims in the forest in front of the Norwegian town, with a background that rewinds the hands of the clock up to 1050 and then returns to the historical present in which the story is set, The film draws as much on Nordic mythology as on the stylistic features of the reference genre, creating an ensemble that disperses strength, energy and good intentions along the path of wishing but I can’t.

The structural cracks of an unoriginal and all too evocative script, which lazily replicates similar stories already seen and reviewed on the screen in a lazy way and without any hint of personalization, ends up subtracting and soon dampening the user’s enthusiasm and expectations, which the author offers an insipid warmed soup. Viking Wolf has nothing to offer in this sense, if not the umpteenth attempt to offer a reinterpretation, in his case in a Norse key, of The Wolf Man, the classic of the classics in the field of werewolves. A milestone, that of George Waggner of 1941, which however cannot be ignored, and which represents a starting point for all those who want to show the deeds of wolfmen in every possible and imaginable sauce.

The fact of not having anything alternative to offer the spectator compared to the innumerable proposals of the past, limiting itself only to transferring the figure of the werewolf where it had never been cinematographically speaking sighted before, is not sufficient to justify the production effort, which between the other boasted a decent budget available to make the cocktail of handcrafted effects and CGI available to the director to bring the monsters to life. Among other things, the latter is decidedly less effective than prosthetics which, unlike computerized VFX, are of superior quality. If we then remove even the rawest and bloodiest component from a horror like this, leaving the mutilations and dismemberments always off-screen, focusing solely on the sound factor.

Viking Wolf Review: The Last Words

Norway produces its first film on the theme of werewolves, with a discrete technical component and an elementary dramaturgical system. How many werewolf movies have been repeated? The plot still follows the same old formula. But still, this movie has good points that make it fun to watch. From the scientific details to explain the myths credibly. The werewolf is made to look scary and move realistically. There is a brutal scene in a long scene chasing in the middle of the city at the end without stopping. And the mother-daughter drama ends the story in a way that invites you to think with an open-ended head very well. Even though the whole story is still the same That said, it’s true.