WER – Review

 

What makes a good horror movie? Do dim lights, a lot of shadows, and a foreboding atmosphere suffice? Or do you also need to throw in a generous amount of gore? And is found footage now a requirement?

Wer, which is helmed by William Brent Bell, the guy who gave us The Devil Inside, feels sadly lacking at times. Sure, it ticks off many items on the horror movie checklist, such as some of elements mentioned above, but it’s hard to discern if this is what you would call a “horror” movie. Hell, it hardly even feels like a movie.

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The film opens with an American family camping in the woods on the outskirts of a French town. The father and his young son get brutally slaughtered by a monster, and the mother, who is the sole survivor of the incident, survives. In her recount of the story, she mentions a huge, tall, hairy man attacking her family. You might, as hinted from the film’s title, guess that this is a reference to a werewolf (or wolfman, if you want to get technical on these terms).

So the authorities go full force on a manhunt for the killer, and they soon round up a suspect, Talan Gwynek (Brian Scott O’Connor). Said suspect is a towering, lumbering seven-foot-tall man, and a perfect fit to the mother’s description. This is when Kate Moore (A.J. Cook), his defence attorney, enters the fray.

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Will she be able to prove the man’s innocence? Or is he really guilty?

That’s a question that is posed only briefly during the film. Instead of teasing out this plot point, and mining it for tension, the film quickly disposes of any pretense of innocence on the part of Talan. Midway through the film, he goes on a crazed rampage during a clinical experiment on him, and kills many doctors in the process.

The authorities try to hunt him down to prevent him from hurting any more people. Kate, being the passionate human rights advocate that she is, decides to help out together with her team. Along the way, there is some mambo jumbo about werewolf-isms. And no more shall be revealed for spoiler-related reasons.

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Dim lights and shadows pervade the film. A copious amount of blood is splattered. Bodies are mutilated. But the film never really scares. In fact, all the horror trappings – the killings and gore and supernatural – only accentuate the film’s lack of any real suspense or tension; they feel like compensation for the non-existence of an interesting story or concept.

Not keeping us on the edge of our seat throughout the film is not in itself a fault, of course. Some horror films can be of the slow-burning variety, and their endings can open us up to real-life horrors. Wer’s ending, though, is insipid and over-the-top. All these things could have been forgiven had there been some genuine emotional hook to the film, but alas, the characters are poorly drawn out.

Maybe we’ll stick to vampire movies for now.

Summary: A few mild scares thrown in, but mostly devoid of frights, action, or emotion.

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars

Raymond Tan