Rating: B
Dir: Sean Ellis
Star: Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran
a.k.a. Eight for Silver
Sometimes, it’s nice to watch a film about which you know very little. I got this as part of a Blu-ray batch: it might have been to reach the necessary amount to get free shipping, effectively costing me less than zero. I’d not heard of it at all, even though the movie opened on almost 1,700 screens here in February 2021. I was too busy getting COVID at that point, I recall. But I am glad to have stumbled across it, albeit almost four years later and by accident. As the title and poster suggest, it’s a were… um, werecreature movie. Just one that finds new direction, impressive in a subgenre of horror now well past its centennial.
It begins in World War I, with an injured officer having a silver bullet dug out of him. We then go back thirty-five years earlier, to a French village. To be honest, I was surprised to see that location: it feels more English, or possibly Irish. Anyway, landowner Seamus Laurent (Petrie) brings in mercenaries to take care of troublesome Gypsies enamored on his land. This goes 0-slaughter in about two minutes. The last survivors are turned into a human scarecrow (top) and buried alive respectively, but their leader puts a curse on the land. It’s not long before local kids are having nightmares. One digs up the silver fangs buried with the Gypsy leader, which triggers his transformation, and an attack on Seamus’s son, Edward.
From here, things escalate rapidly, sending the town into terror. A convenient (and not coincidental) visiting pathologist, John McBride (Holbrook) arrives, following the Gypsies whom he believes were involved in the death of his family. But the epidemic spreads, with each victim bitten itself becoming a creature. This is a nicely constructed mix of old-school and new-school. By being a period were-piece set in France, its closest cousin might be Brotherhood of the Wolf, although that leans more into action, while this plays up horror elements. There’s one especially messy autopsy, which feels as if it wandered in from The Thing. We discover that the creature is not so much a transformed version of its victim, as a shell around it.
According to the director, “I started to think of the wolf as a metaphor for addiction and how you become a prisoner to that addiction.” I have to say, I didn’t particularly pick up on that. But this is probably a good thing, considering my tolerance for horror as heavy-handed allegory is highly limited. It works very well on its own terms, with Ellis, who also wrote and shot thus, doing sterling work across the board. I was especially impressed with the war footage at the beginning, which does a fabulous job of recreating the Battle of the Somme in a few short minutes, and contrasts with the subsequent Gypsy massacre. But generally, I would say he has been more successful in refreshing a classic idea, than Universal with far greater resources in their “Dark Universe”.