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Canada · 2017
1h 18m
Director Ashley McKenzie
Starring Andrew Gillis, Bhreagh MacNeil, Kyle M. Hamilton
Genre Drama
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Blaise and Nessa are outcast methadone users in their small town. Each day they push a rusty lawnmower door-to-door begging to cut grass. Nessa plots an escape, while Blaise lingers closer to collapse. Tethered to one another, their getaway dreams are kept on a suffocatingly short leash.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
This is a raw, intense movie circling on despair, hopelessness and inevitable dead ends. It is about the dark. But in plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future – at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.
Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.
The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
The performers don’t seem like they’re acting at all, which contributes to the film’s unsettling power. The elliptical narrative structure articulates a sad truth of the addict’s life concerning both the challenge and the tedium of making it through to the next fix.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Werewolf isn’t about addiction’s cruelty. McKenzie has given us a story about an addict’s salvation.
For all her attempts at documentary-style verisimilitude, filmmaker Ashley McKenzie doesn’t really cover much new ground with Werewolf.
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
McKenzie deserves credit for revealing such a troubling facet of her homeland, and even if the shallow focus — both literal and figurative — of her movie can be frustrating at times, she bravely never turns away.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
By means of ferociously intimate images, tensely controlled performances, and a spare sense of drama, Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, about two young drug addicts in Nova Scotia, conjures a state of heightened consciousness.
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