Watched: 10/19/2025
Format: Hulu
Viewing: First
Director: Josh Ruben
I recall Werewolves Within (2021) coming out right on the heels of The Wolf of Snow Hollow, a Jim Cummings film I highly recommend. And, wanting to let Werewolves Within breathe and not draw comparisons between two movies about guys in uniforms being asked to hunt down werewolves, I punted, and then forgot about this movie until it came by on my Hulu menu.
A sort of comedy/ horror/ murder mystery - it's a movie set up to keep you guessing in a locked-room mystery where there may or may not be a werewolf.
Sam Richardson ,who you may know from many things, including Detroiters and Ted Lasso, plays a forest ranger who has been sent to what I think is a small Vermont town. The town is largely abandoned for the winter, except for a cast of kooky characters. The tech millionaire gay couple, the folks who run a crafts shop and seem a bit MAGA-y, some goofy rednecks, a BnB owner who hasn't been the same since her husband left, and a postal carrier played by Milana Vayntrub (the AT&T spokesperson).
Someone is trying to bring in a pipeline, which has the town split about selling and cashing out, or enjoying the natural beauty of the area. One night they have both a power failure and avalanche to block the road, and find the generators are all shredded. And someone's Pomeranian is eaten.
Ranger Finn starts to get to the bottom of it as the townsfolk huddle in the Bed and Breakfast, and everyone is a suspect as they all have different motives, buried histories, etc... and maybe someone's a werewolf?
It's a perfectly fine way to spend the runtime of a movie. Sam Richardson is funny, and Milana Vayntrub provides both charm in spades and has comedic chops. The cast includes Harvey Guillen (What We Do in the Shadows) and Cheyenne Jackson.
But it also all feels telegraphed, less about whether there's a werewolf and more about who the likely person is. It does spin into being an R-Rated movie for the violence that pops up in the back 1/3rd and use of the F-bomb.
It's... fine. I laughed a bit. I'm not sure if there was too much or not enough. I liked the characters, but I think once they got into a single room and it felt like they were improvising a bit, I got a little twitchy. But mostly it just feels like pieces of other things frankensteined together.
I wouldn't say not to watch it. It's a perfectly entertaining 97 minutes. But it also feels like a very long episode of a sitcom.
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