The opening shot of Polish horror Wilczyca is of a crow pecking the flesh from a dead horse in a snowy landscape, which quickly establishes an atmosphere of melancholy, bleakness, death and decay; the final six minutes feature a bloody gun shot to the face, a severed arm, and a sword stabbing, which will appeal to gore-hounds. Unfortunately, the ninety or so minutes between these scenes are virtually bloodless, and with a slow pace and uneventful plot, the majority of the film is quite the snooze-fest.
Although ostensibly a werewolf movie, Wilczyca actually draws on the folklore of not just lycanthropy, but also vampirism and witchcraft to create a unique mythos: insurgent Kacper Wosinski (Krzysztof Jasinski AKA Polish Frank Zappa) returns home to find that his wife Maryna (Iwona Bielska) has not only been dabbling in black magic in his absence, but that she has also been unfaithful to him and has tried to terminate her illegitimate unborn child. When Maryna dies of her resultant internal injuries, Kacper cannot bring himself to stake her corpse, as his brother Mateusz (Jerzy Prazmowski) advises, and consequently finds himself menaced by his wife's spirit, which possesses Countess Julia (also played by Bielska), occasionally turning her into a large she-wolf.
This blending of different traditional superstitious beliefs could have resulted in an unpredictable movie with plenty of scope for thrills and chills, one that rewrites the rules, but director Marek Piestrak devotes more time to reflecting his country's anti-semitism, misogyny and Catholicism than to delivering innovative frights. Definitely don't go expecting any An American Werewolf In London style special effects: the werewolf is played by a regular wolf and there are no transformation effects. For the most part, the film relies on atmosphere rather than visceral horror, with the only effective 'scare' being the creepy apparition of the mouldy Maryna encountered by Mateusz in the middle of the night. Sadly, the lack of momentum and sombre visuals make the movie almost as hard to sit through as it is to pronounce.
