★★★★☆
Jordan Downey’s surprising genre mystery sets a very high bar for the best creature feature of the decade.
Here is one of the best horror films of the year, and you may not have heard of it yet. Jordan Downey, the man behind The Head Hunter, starts in the grey, unhurried register of Scandinavian crime fiction. Deborah Ann Woll (fan favourite Karen Page in Marvel’s Daredevil) plays Meg, a forensic anthropologist called to a grisly scene in a small town. Two women have been ripped apart, and beside them lies the body of her father, an oil-rig worker who walked out on the family when she was a child.
For a while, The Cycle plays as a gripping procedural. Downey and co-writer Kevin Stewart let the questions mount: where has this man been all these years, and why did he leave? Meanwhile the evidence grows harder to square with anything Meg knows about how bodies behave. Then the film starts to bare its teeth. Each answer unleashes a wilder set of scares, and by the final act Downey has torn up the muted palette and gone full genre maximalist, with gonzo practical effects that belong in the company of the great creature shows of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Horror fans will be picking their jaws up off the floor.
None of it would land without Woll. Her earnest, truthful performance keeps the madness tethered to a daughter trying to hold her method together while the case turns personal, and the film never loses sight of her even at its most unhinged.
Go in knowing as little as possible, and go in soon. The Cycle is far too good to slip through the cracks.
The Cycle played at Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, and is available to stream now on Shudder.