Viking Wolf

After witnessing a grotesque murder while attending a party in her new town, a teenager starts growing hair in strange places, while having strange visions and bizarre desires.

Viking Wolf (Vikingulven) is a Swedish werewolf movie centered on a teen girl. She’s new in town, and her and her mom are having a hard time. There’s a younger daughter in their family too. She’s deaf, and doesn’t do much except be sweetly innocent, much like a little lamb, which is probably not the best thing to be in a werewolf movie…

Anyway, Teen Girl goes to a party because Local Cute Teen Boy invited her. While there, Local Mean Girl does her thing, but before the Teenage Drama can truly ignite, a werewolf happens upon them, killing Local Mean Girl, and biting Teen Girl, which is gonna be a problem for her.

After that, there’s the usual kind of running and screaming, complete with Teen Girl waking up in weird places with someone else’s blood on her face. Then a grizzled old werewolf hunter shows up for some much needed narrative context, and this all leads to the inevitable public rampage and denouement.

Pretty standard stuff for a werewolf film.

What’s interesting about Viking Wolf is how it’s done like a Scandinavian police-procedural. There’s lots of wet roads winding through dense woods, thick with mist, and a small modern-day fishing hamlet hard up against a chilly fjord of dark glassy water, all of it framed by tall jagged peaks. Rural Sweden really puts in some good work providing the atmosphere here. All of this, coupled with a mythos that ties the origin of werewolves in Sweden to Vikings returning home from raids in Normandy, unknowingly bringing the curse of lycanthropy back with them, all makes for a pretty good approach to the genre in general.

But specifically, the problem with the film is, other some a few small twists on lore and the beautiful setting, Viking Wolf doesn’t have much else to offer. Werewolf films rarely have many “original” core concepts for the most part, so they live and die on the applications of those familiar ideas, and in Viking Wolf, it’s all pretty rote.

The gore is average, and the werewolf transformations and designs in this film fall pretty short of impressive, which is disappointing as this is traditionally a pretty high bar when it comes to special effects, and a chance for effects people to show off. Plus, for a 90 minute movie, the pacing is a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the main story of the mother/daughter conflict, of teenagers becoming “monsters,” intertwined with the fact that the daughter is actually becoming a werewolf, and the mom is a cop with a pocket full of silver bullets, never really sticks the landing, despite having some obvious fertile narrative ground to dig into.

This isn’t a bad film, but because it doesn’t really do all that much that’s new or interesting, it’s hard to recommend that you even bother. Honestly, if you’re looking to watch a werewolf movie, you’d be better off watching one of the classic ones instead: Silver Bullet maybe, or American Werewolf in London, perhaps Ginger Snaps, or The Brotherhood of the Wolf, or my personal favorite… Dog Soldiers.