Werewolf by Night Movie Review (2022)
The infamous monster slayer Ulysses Bloodstone is dead. His widow Verusa (Harriet Sansom Harris) has assembled some of the world’s most infamous hunters to take his throne, arriving on a stormy black-and-white night. Most Hunters lack definition or personality – which is a problem – but the mysterious Jack (Gael García Bernal) is clearly hiding a secret while Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly) comes to the night’s events with heavy baggage. Odysseus’ ex-daughter never really liked Verusa and doesn’t understand the point of the game she’s playing, telling the hunters that they’ll be on a legendary hunt tonight. Oh, and did I mention that Jack is the main character, a monster himself? Or that he has a friend that comic book fans will recognize, nicknamed Ted and better known as Man-Thing?
Sounds like a lot for a “special Marvel presentation,” doesn’t it? It should be. So why does “Werewolf by Night” feel so light? Why is it too long and too short at the same time? It’s a scenario lost between a short film and a feature film, too heavy for the first and too lean for the second. It’s a project that required a few extra twists or memorable characters to give it more weight. And it doesn’t even quite have the Universal Monster Movie flair that one would hope for given its premise. Sure, there are some fun B&W visuals, and, sure, the score is arguably the MVP, but I wanted the strings removed from this streaming behemoth in an overly elegant way. Don’t just dip your toe in legendary style, jump hard with both feet.
So what keeps “Werewolf” from being a disaster? This is one of those projects that is never aggressively bad or good. It’s just a little there, forgettable at the end of the weekend when it drops. To be fair, it helps that the ever-good Bernal seems to be having a lot of fun, and Donnelly finds a nice register of bitter heroism. They’ll be interesting to see in future productions – again, we have a Disney+ project that mostly looks like a way to introduce new characters to later MCU offerings. And maybe that will give more weight to this project in hindsight when we have seen the future adventures of Elsa and Jack. For now, it’s a perfectly enjoyable diversion that never turns into its full potential.
On Disney+ today.