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When Robert Eggers sent the script for his new movie, Werwulf, to his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Blaschke texted back, “Does this take place in hell? Is this hell?” The answer, obviously, is no. But after seeing footage from the film, you understand the confusion.
“I think some Medievalists would be annoyed that I’m kind of clinging to the stereotype of the Middle Ages being like so muddy and dirty and rainy and miserable,” Eggers said at an event in Los Angeles last week. “But like, it needs to be so muddy and rainy and dirty and miserable and shit-covered. It does need to be hell.”
After the success of his 2024 gothic monster movie, Nosferatu, Eggers gave himself a challenge. “I kind of said, ‘Let me try to write the scariest thing I can write,’” he said. “I don’t know that I did that, but I definitely wrote the darkest thing.” The result is Werwulf, which is set in the 1300s and follows a man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) cursed with being a werewolf who balances that with his family, outside forces, and more.
If you’ve seen the trailers, you can already tell that this might be Eggers’ most primitive and visceral film yet. And, at the event, Eggers presented 20 minutes from the first half of the film that showed just that. It’s all spoken in Middle English, and it looked very dark, very dirty, and very real.
While the footage didn’t reveal a ton about the movie itself, if you want to go in cold, it’s probably best to avoid the rest of this article.
One of the biggest revelations of the footage is that Werwulf starts with a werewolf transition. But, Eggers pointed out, it’s not what he called the “set piece” transformation fans are expecting. That comes later.
Werwulf opens over darkness. There’s howling. We cut to a tight close-up of Taylor-Johnson as his mouth starts to foam. The shot gets wider as we see he’s naked, outdoors, and runs into a barn. Inside, he begins to have violent spasms. His body moves in many unnatural positions. Eggers explained later that this was really Taylor-Johnson in the shots. The man falls, stays still for a few beats, and gets back up as the shaking gets worse. The lighting of the shot, which is almost all in one take, has three shadows down the middle, almost like claws.
The man tumbles into darkness, comes back out, and we see that his back begins to bubble and break out with something that looks like an infection. We cut to black, hear a loud howl, and see the moon.
Some of the scenes we saw were in the trailer—here’s one example. © Focus
The next scene may be in sequence, but it was unclear. A young girl emerges from her home to see a field full of dead sheep. This is followed by vast landscape shots with a single, naked person traversing up a mountain. It’s Taylor-Johnson. He arrives at a cabin and knocks at the door. A woman opens it and is in shock. This is Lily-Rose Depp’s character who, we soon learn, is his wife. The woman slowly approaches the man as he begins to sniff her head and hair before the two passionately kiss.
In a new scene, we see a child lying on a snow-covered ground. The child hears a voice. At first, he thinks it’s his father, but the voice says it’s not. He tilts his head and is scared of what he sees. The camera then turns from the child’s face, slowly goes down and across the ground, and back up to become his point of view. There’s a wolf standing there. The child gets ready for battle; he grabs a bird off the ground, bites its head off, and blood splatters all over his face.
The final two scenes introduce some new characters. A trio of men knocks on the door of Taylor-Johnson and Depp’s cabin. One is a terrifying-looking bald man who clearly has some kind of disease, the second is Ralph Ineson in an eye patch, and the third is Willem Dafoe. The man and woman let them in and make them a meal. It’s tense around the table, especially when the bald man starts to grab at Depp’s character. She fights back, he pins her against the wall, and Taylor-Johnson gets involved. A fight breaks out, which is stopped by Dafoe finally speaking.
Dafoe’s character. © Focus
He reveals that he’s been sent by the king to kill a werewolf that has been terrorizing this area and forces Taylor-Johnson’s character to join them on the quest. It’s unclear if he knows this is the person he’s hunting, but there might be some suspicion. In the next scene, the group gets ready to go as the man and woman’s two children come out to hug and say goodbye to their father.
Later, Dafoe and the now three other men come across a section of woods filled with bodies. They’ve been torn to shreds. More bodies are also hanging on a nearby tree for the birds to feast on. One is fresh. They encounter an odd-looking woman and ask her to take them to someone they refer to as the “old cunning woman.” She leads the way.
They approach a very old, weathered hut. An old woman is inside, and Dafoe’s character asks her about her husband, whom he believes to be a werewolf. She dives into a slow, sad speech that’s kind of difficult to understand (on purpose, Eggers said, because the characters aren’t supposed to fully understand it either). But we do get the gist that her husband was a werewolf, but she loved him anyway. She presents his skull as proof that he’s now dead and, eventually, Dafoe throws her up against the wall, possibly killing her. He says that no one can know the things she knows.
The husband’s skull. © Focus
Again, Eggers explained that all these scenes are from the first half of the movie. So, presumably, the truth of Taylor-Johnson’s character will become more prevalent, and we’ll eventually see him showdown with Dafoe and his orders. And, at some point, we’ll get a big, gross, transformation scene. Which is saying something because the one that opens the movie is pretty big and gross on its own.
Werwulf opens on December 25. And if you’d like more, Focus also just launched a Werwulf alternate reality game, which you can dig into here.
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