Tonvortex. For the central teenager of the French art horror film, the name is completely wrong: a heavy metal musician with a shaved head. Teddy is neither cute nor particularly cute, but he does become furry in the light of the full moon. He is a werewolf, even though the young filmmaking brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma are too elegant-and too wise-when Teddy transforms, they only show a flash of bone wolf feet.
This movie is actually a very confident genre, from Buhmas: a social realist black comedy of physical horror, with elements of adult drama. It reminds me of Julia Ducournau’s cannibal movie Raw, but I’m not sure how much it has to say. Anthony Bajon plays Teddy, a high school student who dropped out of a poor family. He lives with his disabled aunt and alcoholic uncle (Ludovic Torrent); “We are idiots in the village,” Teddy said. Knowing what everyone in town thinks of his family, Teddy behaves like a silly yob grumpy. He is also the worst casual worker in Ghislaine’s Nimble Fingers in the world, where the owner Ghislaine (Noémie Lvovsky) is a lazily predictable middle-aged woman.
To be fair, most of the characters in the movie are unlucky, Fargo style. More interesting than Ghislaine is the sleepy local police investigating a series of attacks on sheep, which the locals believe is the work of the wolf. One night, Teddy walked into the woods and came out with stabbing marks on his back. Next you know that he was covered with blood when he woke up, and you don’t know how it got there. Then body hair: the moment he took out a growing hair from his eyeball, he cringed fearfully.
The Boukhermas family did not delve into whether the werewolf is a metaphor for Teddy’s anger. But their film ends with a Carrie-like massacre scene, which shows their potential to become film brothers.
