Alma & the Wolf Review

Alma & the Wolf is now playing in select theaters and available on digital.

Alma & the Wolf is a frustrating type of movie to talk about, in part because it’s really more like two types of movie pressed together. On the one hand, it’s an intentionally schlocky horror movie about a town being terrorized by a supernatural threat – a bit of a creature feature blended with a dash of the ol’ Wicker Man folk-horror. On the other, it’s a more psychological, unreliable-narrator yarn about a cop (Ethan Embry) trying to find his missing estranged son. For a while, both movies are pretty compelling, with director Michael Patrick Jann relying on his deep comedy background to walk the tonal tightrope of laughs and scares in Abigail Miller’s screenplay. But despite their best efforts, and those of Embry and Sinners breakout Li Jun Li, this curious hybrid topples over during a conclusion that cheapens much of what comes before it.

Our cop, Deputy Ren Accord, is actually the main character, first glimpsed in the rather striking image of Embry standing in a field holding a red balloon. As you might expect, he’s not a particularly good dad: He drinks a bit too much and he’s almost late for his son’s critical baseball game. The titular Alma enters the picture a little earlier; we first see her covered in blood and cradling a mysterious bundle. Anyone entranced by the badass, vampire-fighting mom Li played earlier this year will still recognize her here, though she transforms herself into a meek, traumatized presence for Alma’s introduction. She also has a bit of a drinking problem that’s known to the whole town of Spiral Creek, Oregon, which means Ren isn’t exactly keen to believe Alma when she says a giant wolf attacked her and her dog.

As the pair forms a tentative relationship, Ren’s own sanity comes into question, and Alma & The Wolf begins weaving together the threads of its various genres. Jann, who got his start with influential sketch troupe The State before directing the cult classic Drop Dead Gorgeous, maintains a slightly off-kilter tone and sense of humor, best represented by material like a running joke about wolf hunting being a Class-C felony in Oregon. But that also means that it’s hard to figure out exactly what kind of movie we’re watching: Does that wolf suit look intentionally low-rent, or is it a result of the low budget? Is the dialogue, delivered by comedy pros like Jann’s State mate Kevin Allison and fellow Reno 911! alum Mather Zickel, knowingly corny and awkward? Miller’s script entertains well enough to suggest it’s aware of and capitalizing on this dissonance, and combined with Jann’s direction, it actually begins to gel together with all the dream sequences and surreal fakeouts and possible gaslighting orchestrated by the people of Spiral Creek. You may even forget for a bit that Li is disappointingly absent for long stretches of time.

The thing is, Alma & the Wolf does eventually have to decide what kind of movie it is, and the result is a third act that lets the wind out of the sails. It’s not so much that it’s an out-of-nowhere twist or that it’s stupid; in fact, the most frustrating part is that taken on its own, it’s actually quite suspenseful. The climax breaks out some impressively gnarly FX, and feels like it’s delivering the cult werewolf freakout promised by the rest of the movie.

Unfortunately, when the waning runtime forces Miller and Jann to come down on one side or the other, their decision ends up feeling a little obvious and cheap in a way that reverberates back through the preceding scenes. The characters just aren’t drawn well enough for it to be emotionally devastating or hit at a some deeper thematic level. That’s not helped by the way Alma & the Wolf goes out of its way to show us “the truth” about what’s really going on for 90 minutes and change. It dampens the blow, but it in a way that feels mildly defensive – like it needs to cross the “t”s and dot the “i”s so people don’t get mad. The final scene itself seems to come from an entirely different movie – and the thing is, that movie would’ve been great. It’s a testament to all involved that there’s something to appreciate in Alma & the Wolf even when you just wanna say “Man, come on” to it all.