Film / Viking Wolf

Viking Wolf is a 2022 Norweigan horror movie directed by Stig Svendsen, starring Liv Mjönes, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Arthur Hakalahti and Sjur Vatne Brean.

After moving with her parents to the small town of Nybo, seventeen-year-old Thale Berg hangs out with her classmates at a party over near the bay. Everything seems fine until one of her classmates is brutally killed by an unseen assailant. It wounds Thale on the shoulder, and no one can identify what kind of animal it was. As Thale's mother, who is the town's deputy, launches her investigation, Thale tries to move on from the traumatic event, until she experiences strange anomalies. Is it PTSD? Or something far worse...?

Tropes include:

• Ambiguous Ending: Liv loads her gun with a silver bullet and reluctantly presses it against Thale, but we are not shown whether she went through with it or not. The last shot is a despondent Liv placing the silver bullet in front of a framed picture of Thale. The camera then ominously zooms in on the bullet as sinister music builds. The bullet is clean, but whether Liv just washed the blood off or set Thale free in the woods is left up in the air.
• Asshole Victim: Vidar constantly pokes fun of Thale and even condescendingly asks her why she didn't save Elin when she was killed while also taunting her bite wound. It's hard to feel sympathy for him when Thale kills him as a wolf.
• Bait-and-Switch: Two moments
  • When the camera focuses on the peaceful-looking house of the Bergs, we suddenly hear a blood-curdling scream. Cut to where the scream is coming from: a horror movie on TV.
  • Thale, who is running away from school after severe trauma, begins to cry. Her breaths are overlapped by growling. Cut to the woods where the hunters' dogs are growling.
• Body Motifs: Thale has heterochromia, and it even shows in her wolf form. This is how Jenny recognizes her.
• Cassandra Truth: Lars informs Liv that Elin was killed by a werewolf. Of course, the tough-as-nails town deputy Liv sees this as disrespectful. After encountering and surviving the werewolf attack, she turns to him for help.
• Determinator: Liv, who had already suffered a fractured wrist and was willing to put an end to the werewolf curse. Even after she finds out that the last werewolf remaining is her daughter.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • After locking his keys in his car, Arthur uses his fist to bust the windows of his car in order to get himself and Jenny to safety. This works...until Arthur passes out from blood loss a few minutes later.
  • Lars crashes his RV through a store wall in the climax, a possible Shout-Out to Grandpa's scene in The Lost Boys. But instead of being much help, the veteran werewolf hunter suffers severe head trauma from the crash and easily picked off by the werewolf.
• Die Laughing: Lars as a drooling werewolf approaches him.
• Disappeared Dad: Thale's father died some time ago from an unknown illness. Ever since, Thale held her mother responsible because she was hardly there.
  Thale: Dad had to die before you actually wanted to be there for me!
• Downer Ending: Lots of Nybo's town residents have been killed by Thale and several others by the werewolf before her. More depressingly, Liv—who has been estranged from her daughter since her husband's death—is forced to possibly shoot her transformed daughter to prevent more killings. And if she spared her, then Thale is permanently a wolf and still out there.
• Fingore: The morning after Thale partially transforms and kills Jonas, she vomits up what she had bitten off...
• Gory Discretion Shot: When Thale transforms on the bus, a severed arm is hurled at the driver.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: In the climax, Jenny tries to remind her transformed sister who she is (see Meaningful Echo below). Interestingly, Thale does recognize her sister and calms down, but both attempts were interrupted by a third party.
• Killer Rabbit: The opening of the film has countless Vikings slaughtered by what was thought to be a regular wolf pup.
• Meaningful Echo: "I will always look after you."
• Mercy Kill: Two instances.
  • Lars unplugs Sheriff Eilert's life support system to prevent his lycanthropy. Though, he apologizes before doing so.
  • Liv with the additional attempt to sever the werewolf bloodline by killing a permanently transformed Thale. Maybe.
• Mirror Reveal: After waking up and vomiting blood, Thale gets a startling surprise when she sees her more wolf-like face in the mirror.
• New Parent Nomenclature Problem: Thale can't call her stepfather Arthur "Dad" and even expresses a subtle resentment towards him.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Blunt instruments, electrocution, and even lead bullets aren't enough to harm the werewolf. A silver bullet on the other hand...
• Our Werewolves Are Different: While the infected victim's senses are heightened, their face takes on wolf-like traits on the night before the full moon. Once the full moon fully rises, they will fully transform permanently. Visually the werewolves aren't overtly supernatural, looking like large wolves and walking like them too instead of the popular two legged hybrid creature. They appear to still have some level of human reason and memory but are ultimately slaves to their hunger.
• Precision F-Strike: Interestingly, in the English dub. When Liv tries to assure Thale why they moved to a small town, she does not take it well.
  Liv: That's why we came here to have a fresh start, kind of. Do you understand?
  Thale: [sarcastically] No, not really. You're fucking joking, right?
• Shout-Out:
  • The newly turned werewolf suffers hallucinations of those who were killed by the creature speaking to the main character.
  • Elin's autopsy has lines that are similar to another movie by saying that the "arm has been severed above the elbow with massive tissue loss".
• Single Tear: Wolf Thale sheds one as she's tranquilized before closing her eyes.
• Sleep Walking: One of the apparent symptoms of lycanthropy.
• Survivor Guilt: Thale suffers this following Elin's death. It doesn't help that it literally haunts her as part of her hallucinations.
• Transformation Horror: Aside from a Painful Transformation, it is shown that the human skin starts to tear off.
• Uncertain Doom: It's left unclear as to whether Liv went through with Mercy Killing Thale or set her free in the wild. Either way, it's not a pleasant fate because if it's the former, Liv had to kill her own daughter, and if it's the latter, Thale is permanently a bloodthirsty animal.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The vikings in the beginning had no idea that the wolf pup they found in a locked vault was in fact a "hound of hell". The wolf killed all the sailors before vanishing into the Norwegian wilderness, kickstarting the plot a thousand years later.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Arthur is last seen suffering blood loss from his escaping Thale. He is never seen again.