Viking Wolf review.
Viking Wolf is a badass title for a movie that doesn’t innovate or have nearly as much fun as it should. It’s time for another Full Moon Feature.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Viking Wolf
Directed by Stig Svendsen
Written by Espen Aukan and Stig Svendsen
Starring Liv Mjönes, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Arthur Hakalahti, Kasper Antonsen, Vidar Magnussen and Sjur Vatne Brean
Viking Wolf Review
I don’t know exactly what I expected from a movie called Viking Wolf. It sounds like it’s going to be cool. Maybe I was anticipating a movie set in the past where a Viking can turn into a wolf tears his enemies apart. … Ok maybe I was expecting exactly that. That’s not what we get. Instead, we get a very basic werewolf movie that follows well-trodden story beats.
We actually do start in the past. Vikings find a wolf while sacking a village and bring it home with them. It kills them all before they reach home and escapes to the woods. A fun story…unfortunately told mostly in text at the start of Viking Wolf. In modern day, Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) and her friends are attacked in the woods. Thale’s mother Liv (Liv Mjönes) is a police officer who looks into the attack.
So, it’s an investigative horror werewolf movie. It’s also a family drama. The hook Viking Wolf hopes to sink into you is the mother/daughter relationship. They have a strained relationship when the movie begins and it is only further stressed by Thale’s new situation. She, of course, has contracted the curse of the werewolf.
The mother/daughter dynamic never works as well as Viking Wolf hopes it will. What works better are the characters’ individual journeys. Liv’s investigation leads her from skeptic to werewolf believer to realizing her daughter is cursed. Meanwhile, Thale is starting to go through changes as a result of the wolf attack. I’m sure you know where that is leading.
It just isn’t leading there very quickly. It takes 70 minutes for the full moon to arrive and Thale’s final transformation to begin. Now…credit where it’s due…Viking Wolf has a pretty darn good transformation scene. Slow, painful and on a public bus. It’s the highlight of the movie.
We get some bloody chaos over the final 20 minutes but Viking Wolf inevitably leans back on its attempt at family drama. It’s not that its bad…it’s that we’ve seen it all before. Liv’s investigation into werewolves is fine…but we’ve seen it. Thale’s slow transformation is good…but we’ve seen it before. Viking Wolf is a movie that does everything competently…it just doesn’t have original ideas.
Now…as this is a Full Moon Feature, what really matters is how good the wolfing is. It’s a mixed bag. The CGI wolf looks decent…and the transformation scene is terrific. The problem is that so much of Viking Wolf is about the lead up to the wolf fun…and not enough of it is showcased. The lore is pretty good, however. The resident werewolf expert tells Liv that she has to sever the bloodline or the curse will continue to spread. This causes an obvious conflict once she realizes her own daughter is now a part of that bloodline.
Viking Wolf doesn’t do anything wrong as a werewolf story. Focusing on the converging sides of a personal wolf situation isn’t an inherently bad idea. It just never feels like an original one. As an allegory for a mother/daughter relationship…it’s fine. It leads to a thematically interesting resolution on that front. As a werewolf movie, however, it’s missing something. The lack of fun and violence combined with the long wait to get our wolf cap the enjoyment factor. It’s a fine movie to throw on during a full moon…but we’ve seen better.
Scare Value
In the end, Viking Wolf is a very basic retelling of common werewolf movie beats. It tries to build off of emotions…but mostly falls flat. There are plenty of decent things here…but nothing that you haven’t seen before. All of the wolf fun is held off until the final act…and underwhelms when it finally arrives. A decent effort that could have used some fresh takes.
2.5/5
Viking Wolf Link
Streaming on Netflix
Viking Wolf Trailer
If you enjoyed this review of Viking Wolf, check out another Full Moon Feature: Teen Wolf: The Movie or Silver Bullet
