Viking Wolf
Film review
John Smistad
Olympia, Wash.
Editor’s note: It’s October, and Halloween is on its way—and that means horror! Fortunately, the Quick Flick Critic, our own John Smistad, is on hand to review a scary Norwegian movie now streaming on Netflix for your Halloween horror fix.
Synopsis: Teenager Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, “Royalteen”) has recently moved with her family from Oslo to a quaint Norwegian community for her mother’s (Liv Mjönes, Midsommar) new job as the town’s local police chief. Almost immediately a fellow high school student is savagely murdered at a local party. Thale is a key witness to the slaying. But who, or what, is the killer?
Vikingulven (Viking Wolf) may best be summarized with these three “V”s. No, not Julius Caesar’s Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Oh, no.
Much more like filmmaker Stig Svendsen’s Violent, Visceral, Vicious.
It may take a while for this mostly well done horror thriller to really get rockin’ ’n rollin”. All the same, once this macabre melee motors into full gear here, and the bloody fangs and razor-sharp claws are brought to brutal bare, Svendsen signals sternly that he is done screwin’ around.
Okay, yeah, semi-spoiler alert: This is a werewolf flick, friends. As such, you are gonna need to suspend belief while concurrently allowing for more than a few holes in the story in tandem with a whole host of lapses in continuity. Nevertheless, if you give in and surrender to the preposterous premise, then Vikingulven jerks you on a journey jam-packed with jolt after jarring jolt. Which, after all, is the gist.
And, to be fair (and certainly more than just a little charitable), the scientific and historical basis for the existence of the carnivorous creature is relatively well thunk out. All the way down to the fictitious “Gudbrand the Grim” and his plundering band of Viking marauders, who some 10 centuries earlier had unwittingly released the hound of hell on earth to get the whole hellish mess started in the first place.
Uff da!
This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of The Norwegian American. To subscribe, visit SUBSCRIBE or call us at (206) 784-4617.
