Viking Wolf Parent Guide

Having just moved to the remote Norwegian town of Nybo, seventeen-year-old Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) worries about fitting in. When she sneaks off to meet some other students by the beach, she’s just hoping to make some new friends – but what happens changes everything.

While out for a walk, Thale watches helplessly as a colossal wolf leaps out of the woods and mauls Elin (Silje Øksland Krohne), dragging her screaming into the darkness. Thale is also injured, but her biggest struggle is coping with what she saw. As she tries to recover, her mother Liv (Liv Mjönes), a police officer, is working to find Elin and kill the wolf. But the forests are large, and a wolf can hide nearly anywhere, so Liv has to turn to some of the local hunters for help. One of them insists that this is no ordinary wolf; that this must be a werewolf, a victim of an ancient curse brought back by Vikings from Normandy nearly a thousand years ago. And while Liv isn’t about to buy a story like that, she does hold on to the silver bullet he gives her…

It’s hard to make a boring movie about werewolves, but Viking Wolf manages quite capably to drain all the excitement out of the story. The characters barely feel like people, and they never get any serious development. The script doesn’t try very hard to build up the wolf either, so the end result is a horror movie with uninteresting victims and a blandly familiar perpetrator. If the filmmakers are going to introduce the whole ancient Viking curse motif, they should lean into it; grab it as a narrative element to make this feel distinct from your average creature feature. But they don’t, and the result is a thoroughly unsatisfying tale of the least interesting lycanthrope I’ve ever seen.

I don’t even think teenagers are going to have much fun with this, and parents might have some reservations about letting them watch it in the first place. While the wolf CGI isn’t particularly good, it’s good enough to sell the messy gore effects. People get thoroughly mutilated throughout the film, including more than a few dismemberments, and a queasy scene of a character vomiting up a human finger they ate the night before as a wolf. It’s not exactly appetizing, I’ll tell you that.

Frankly, the gore isn’t my big issue. In a movie like this, that’s what you expect. That’s arguably the point of these kind of monster movies. But the deathly boredom that the movie exudes from every scene is unforgivable. I’m a fan of the genre so I can stand to be disturbed, grossed out, and downright nauseated in a horror movie. I can’t stand to be bored.