In any contest for the top slot by the humanoid monsters of the movies, zombies and vampires fight it out for the number one slot, while werewolves lope along way behind. It could be worse – the mummies in their tatty bandages get barely any attention and even further down the field are invisible men who are hardly ever seen (geddit?). So maybe the werewolf doesn’t have it too bad, all things considered.
At first glance 2013’s Wer appears to be in the business of pushing the fanged, hirsute lycanthrope even further down the pecking order. But first a pre-credits sequence in which a nice French family on a camping holiday are subjected to a savage monstering by entity unknown. Post-credits, the cops arrive on the scene and have soon made an arrest.
They have a huge hairy guy in their cells. His lawyer arrives. She’s not so sure the police have the right man and so sets off to investigate, taking with her a trusty legal assistant and her ex-boyfriend, who is something in medical forensics.
They visit the pathology lab to look at the the bodies (gruesome). They visit the scene of the attack. They visit his home and talk to his protective, fretting mother. Rather than a werewolf movie, we appear to be in the land of the “prime suspect” police procedural – prime example of this being the TV series Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren. And as this is the template for a particular type of cop show, you can almost time to the second the moment when someone will burst into the interview room to have a word with the boss cop – there’s been another similar murder and so this guy, the guy they’re currently interrogating, simply can’t be the person they’re looking for
Director William Brent Bell and his co-writer Matthew Peterman stoke the genre fire, but the wrong one, it seems, with a story that follows the set-ups of the police procedural. Wer is shot like a cop drama. The characters who populate it, such as antsy seen-it-all French cop Klaus Pistor (craggy Sebastian Roché) are all familiar. Most obvious: the casting of AJ Cook as the investigating lawyer, Kate Moore. Cook is best known for her long service on the TV show Criminal Minds, where she plays an investigator confounding received wisdom on a weekly basis.
We’re being played with. Bell and Peterman are leading us up a particular garden path and this they do rather well. Adding a bit of grist to the dramatic mill are Simon Quarterman as slightly peevish ex-boyfriend Gavin and Vik Sahay as Kate’s legal man friday, whose modish stubble and longish hair might also be a wander up the wrong path. Either way, both the guys have a thing for Kate, and chests will bump before this show is over.
As Talan Gwynek, the big hairy brute in custody, we have Brian O’Connor, occasional bassist with the band Eagles of Death Metal whose nickname in real life is Big Hands, on account of his big hands. The rest of him is pretty big too. Good casting. He’s not done anything before or since (as I write in 2023). The Gwynek family is originally from Romania, we’re told, so that might explain the unusual name. Romania is also where the film was shot and where many of the supporting cast and crew are from. Why not just set it all in Romania? Because this way Cook gets to demonstrate her ability to speak French.
Bell loves Alien-style boo scares and probably gives us one or two more than are necessary but he’s good at them. And he also times very nicely the transition from the out-and-out police procedural to the werewolf movie – the beast takes flight, chase is given, beast at bay etc – and then shifts quickly through the gears on a mission to satisfy even the most bloodlusty. Things get pretty banzai, pretty schlocky, and it does not end well for at least one key character, with Bell and Peterman deciding that the best way to end is with a staple from another genre entirely: the big superhero-style beating-the-shit-out-of-each-other finale. Why not? Fun!
Wer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
