WEREWOLF
Werewolf
Ashley McKenzie, 2018
Catalog No.: FTF-077
Length: 80 minutes
The hardscrabble existence of two homeless addicts is portrayed with sensitivity and brutal honesty in acclaimed filmmaker Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature. Shot almost entirely in oblique close-ups to capture the disorientation and frustration of McKenzie’s characters, twentysomething junkies Blaise and Vanessa, Werewolf doggedly and courageously refuses to romanticize its characters lives. Sleeping in tents, fighting with government bureaucrats, Blaise and Vanessa survive primarily through an underground economy. They harass people to let them cut their grass with a rusty old mower they haul over dirt roads and through rainstorms. Such scenes capture the futility, toil, and frustration in their lives with startling power, like some crack-addled version of the Stations of the Cross.
Written, Directed and Edited by Ashley McKenzie
Produced by Nelson MacDonald and Ashley McKenzie
Cinematography by Scott Moore
Music by Youth Haunts
Cast: Blaise Andrew Gillis and Nessa Bhreagh MacNeil
Festivals: Toronto Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, IndieLisboa and more...
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PRESS
"The performers don’t seem like they’re acting at all, which contributes to the film’s unsettling power. The elliptical narrative structure articulates a sad truth of the addict’s life concerning both the challenge and the tedium of making it through to the next fix."
— Glenn Kenny, The New York Times
Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.
— Mike D'Angelo, AV Club
"McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness."
— Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice
"A notable feature debut with this unsparing portrait of two homeless young dope addicts...Generates a haunting mood of 21st-century despair."
— J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"Achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters... And there's something almost theatrically existential about Blaise and Vanessa's plight; hauling around a junk mower in intolerable heat, they suggest characters in an update of Waiting for Godot as rewritten by Hubert Selby Jr."mood of 21st-century despair."
— Chuck Bowen, Slant
"Werewolf is a daunting feral joy."
— Ray Pride, New City
“An intoxicating first feature from a rising filmmaker.”
—Christopher Shobert, The Playlist
"The New Ken Loach is in Canada."
— Louise-Camille Bouttier, Rolling Stone France
“Werewolf,” isn’t a horror movie in substance but in spirit. McKenzie fuses a documentary-like observational precision with a creative imagination that endows her characters’ struggles with a quietly monumental grandeur."
— Richard Brody, The New Yorker