Howl (2015)

A British overnight train departs London, strikes a deer in a remote forest, and promptly finds itself besieged by werewolves. Paul Hyett directs with the grim efficiency of a man who once built monsters for a living, and the result is a compact siege picture in which a guard, a tea-trolley attendant, and a carriage full of strangers barricade themselves behind metal grates while something with too many teeth works the roof. The cast is game, the gore is wet, and the whole enterprise knows precisely what it is. Nobody involved is pretending otherwise.

Which leaves the cultural ledger remarkably bare. The passengers include a divorced mother, a businessman of flexible morality, an engineering student, an elderly couple, and a single South Asian actor reading a novel, and none of them are arranged to make a point about anything. The selfish businessman is selfish because the plot requires a man who will shove a woman out of a door to save himself, not because the film has opinions about markets. The women are survivors and victims in the standard proportions. There is no romantic subtext to interrogate, no environmental subtext to unearth, no diagnosis to hand down from the screen. It is a film about teeth.

What we have, then, is a creature feature that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for darkness, damp, and sudden violence. It is not a lecture. It is not a rebuke. It is ninety minutes of people making poor decisions on public transport while something hungry circles the carriage. On the scale that concerns us, this registers as a clean zero across the board, an artifact from a prelapsarian age of genre cinema when a werewolf was just a werewolf and nobody expected an apology for it.