Around the time Mortal Kombat became the first big hit video-game movie, 30 years ago, it would have been difficult to picture Steven Spielberg pitching himself as the director for a game-based film. It would have been even weirder to picture the video game company turning him down for wanting too much control. Yet that’s apparently exactly what happened with Call of Duty. The announcement that a film version is moving forward at Paramount was accompanied by a separate insider report that Activision didn’t want the Spielberg version because the director would receive final cut. This seems like a sign that game-based movies have abruptly skipped from their disreputable phase to their corporate-driven adaptation-fealty phase, without that sweet spot in the middle where games might be treated as creative jumping-off points for inventive filmmakers – “normal” source material akin to a novel or an older movie. (In superhero-movie terms, this would be the Raimi/Nolan era.) It’s a shame, because that approach is how we got Werewolves Within, easily one of the best game-based movies so far (and arriving for a spooky-season stint on Hulu as of today).
Ubisoft’s Werewolves Within lacks the popularity levels of Call of Duty, much less the Mario universe. It’s essentially a digital-era whodunit, based on the old low-tech parlor game where players attempt to identify who among them are the secret bad guys. That basic premise is pretty much the only thing the movie takes from its source. It’s set in the contemporary small town of Beaverfield, rather than the game’s medieval village, and aptly named screenwriter Mishna Wolff creates her own set of townsfolk to serve as victims and/or suspects. The primary point-of-view character is Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson), a forest ranger recently assigned to Beaverfield. Assorted familiar but not exactly super-famous faces round out the ensemble, including Michael Chernus from Severance; Cheyenne Jackson, a supporting player on 30 Rock; one-season Saturday Night Live performer Michaela Watkins; and Milana Vayntrub, best known for her AT&T ads. The town has been divided by a natural-gas pipeline proposal, with some residents resisting the incursion and others eager to sell off their land for a sizable payday.
Though the situation and characters aren’t directly from the game, director Josh Ruben outfits everyone with the kind of signature outfits that might make a game character quickly and easily identifiable: a ranger uniform, a postal carrier outfit, a mountain-man hunter’s fur coat and hat, and so on. (“I wanted the wardrobes to look like they might get turned into action figures,” Ruben told Vanity Fair.) The writing and the performances follow suit, giving the characters clear shtick – the urbane transplants, the crude shit-kickers, the ultra-polite ranger – that doubles as social shorthand; handy in a 95-minute mystery with a lot of suspects and pre-existing relationships.
Ruben, who made the recent slasher rom-com Heart Eyes, takes the number of characters — a major change from his first feature Scare Me, most of which features two to three people in a room — as a welcome challenge. He often blocks scenes to pack as many people into the screen as possible, and plays with the jump-scare conventions of sudden appearances in the frame. It’s a clever way of both accounting for characters’ whereabouts and overwhelming the viewer as they try to calculate who the killer might be once bodies start turning up. It’s not a spoiler to say that, in classic Twilight Zone fashion, the townspeople are primed to turn on each other, whether or not there’s an actual werewolf in their midst. The film was shot in early 2020, and the filmmakers tap into political rancor without getting too heavy-handed (or, for that matter, too tiresomely eager to satirize “both sides”). The movie unexpectedly hinges on a clever question: How many werewolves does it actually take to tear apart a cute little community? It could be as little as zero.
This all makes for a satisfying murder mystery, and one that broadly imitates the mechanics of gameplay without feeling pre-programmed. It’s able to avoid that feeling in large part because Werewolves Within works so well as a comedy, with verbal and visual jokes bouncing from character to character. Much of this stuff is behavioral; lines that are funny because of who, why, and how they’re said, rather than fulfilling a quip requirement. Vayntrub — again, the AT&T girl! — is especially funny and charming as Cecily, the postal worker who gives Finn the lay of the land (and some flirtatious banter that pre-visions Ruben’s Heart Eyes) before the terror kicks in. Ping-ponging dialogue, deadpan asides, and fast-flying jokes aren’t exactly an intuitive choice for a game adaptation — or even for a horror-comedy, where gags tend to focus on over-the-top gore. But Ruben and Wolff make it work with such confidence that neophytes might not ever realize the game connection if not for the Ubisoft logo upfront. (In that same Vanity Fair interview, Ruben says he asked Ubisoft whether there were any Easter eggs he should work into his movie, and it sounds like the studio essentially shrugged it off, emphasizing movie quality over a pledge of devotion to hardcore fans.)
Obviously, expectations will differ for a Call of Duty movie, or anything else adapting the many games that are better-known than Werewolves Within. At the same time, the Werewolves Within movie briefly pointed to how game adaptations can be inventive, distinctive, and accessible to non-gamer audiences, even without a Spielberg-level filmmaker at the helm. Since then, the Super Mario Bros. and Five Nights at Freddy’s movies have made way too much money for a major title to borrow that approach going forward. But anyone interested in a game-based movie that’s more than a feature-length fan souvenir should check this one out, and see how good we can have it when game companies actually trust their filmmakers.
Werewolves Within is streaming now on Hulu.
