Viking Wolf parents guide

Viking Wolf Parent Guide

What could be worse than an ancient Viking curse that just won't die?

Overall D

Netflix: Thale's just trying to make new friends and then she learns about the terrifying Viking curse that sees werewolves preying on the people of her town.

Release date February 3, 2023

Violence D
Sexual Content A
Profanity D
Substance Use C

Why is Viking Wolf rated TV-MA? The MPAA rated Viking Wolf TV-MA for language, violence

Run Time: 98 minutes

Parent Movie Review

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.

Directed by Stig Svendsen. Starring Liv Jones, Elli Rhiannon Muller Osborne, Arthur Hakalahti. Running time: 98 minutes. Theatrical release February 3, 2023. Updated

Viking Wolf
Rating & Content Info

Why is Viking Wolf rated TV-MA? Viking Wolf is rated TV-MA by the MPAA for language, violence

Violence: Many people are mauled by an animal, with graphic bloody depictions of injury and dismemberment. Individuals are seen being killed with a sword. An animal is repeatedly shot. A severely mangled corpse is seen. A character is seen vomiting a finger.
Sexual Content: None.
Profanity: There are 12 sexual expletives, several scatological terms, and infrequent use of mild curses and terms of deity in the script.
Alcohol / Drug Use: Adult and teen characters are briefly seen drinking socially.

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Other werewolf movies include Werewolves Within, An American Werewolf in London, Teen Wolf, and The Wolfman. Netflix has picked up a lot of Norwegian films lately, including Troll, Narvik, Blasted, and The Trip.