Dog Soldiers (2002)

Dog Soldiers arrives from 2002, a full decade and a half before anyone thought to audit a werewolf picture for its moral instruction. Neil Marshall's debut deposits six British soldiers in the Scottish Highlands for a training exercise against the SAS, and within a day they are barricaded in a farmhouse while a family of lycanthropes works through them one at a time. The film is a siege, a monster movie, and a very dry comedy about men who have run out of ammunition and options. It is also, by the standards we now apply, remarkably free of editorial intent.

The cast is uniformly white and uniformly male, with a single substantial female part belonging to Megan, the zoologist who turns out to be the thing in the walls. No character announces an identity, examines a prejudice, or pauses the siege to explain a social ill. Race goes unmentioned. So do sexuality, climate, body image, and neurology. The script's lone gesture toward a theme is the revelation that Cooper's squad was bait, sacrificed so a government program could capture a werewolf for weaponization. That is a complaint about institutions treating soldiers as materiel, an old grievance and not a manifesto about capital. Wells and Cooper get angry. Nobody gets lectured.

What remains is a film about being eaten in a remote location, executed with practical effects, a fondness for Aliens, and a tabloid punchline. Marshall wanted the creatures to be an enemy that happens to be werewolves. He got his wish. We are left with a lean, mean, and entirely unimproving piece of genre filmmaking, and there is a modest relief in that.