The Cycle
by Hope Madden
Seven years ago, ThanksKilling director Jordan Downey crafted the nearly wordless folk horror The Head Hunter. The medieval fantasy relies on framing, sound design, set design, creature design, and one brooding central performance to compel rap attention and generate real dread.
The filmmaker’s new Shudder original The Cycle flexes many of the same team muscles for a police procedural turned creature feature.
Downey’s film follows Meg (Deborah Ann Woll), a forensic scientist called in to help a coastal town police force with a new crime scene. Two victims, both mainly eaten, obvious animal attack. One additional body on the scene, long dead. Meg’s dad.
What the police, including chief Marks (Jeffrey Donovan), can’t figure out is why his body is there and why the maggots haven’t had their fill of him yet.
The emotional core of the film is the conflict within Meg, who ceased thinking about her father decades ago, when he abandoned her and her mother. Instead, she focused on what she could see, study, and figure out. That happened to be corpses. The conflict comes first from having to grapple with the human reality of her father, and then something else decidedly unscientific.
Woll is up to the task, and Jordan bathes her investigation in the cool blues of a Fincher investigation. The cast around her supports without overshadowing, allowing the lead performance quiet power.
But where Fincher’s forensic investigator would be working against the clock to stop a serial killer, Meg’s case is more related to a calendar than a clock, and the killer requires a lot more prosthetics than any of the monsters Fincher unveiled.
Downey’s no stranger here, although the creature work in The Cycle isn’t always on point. Cinematographer (and co-writer) Kevin Stewart relies often on shaky cam to keep the FX hidden, but there are a handful of very impressive monster moments.
The film goes on for too long, and while Downey has found a new entry point to an old mythology, he asks viewers to make a couple too many big leaps in logic. More attention paid to the mythology, streamlining the rest would have resulted in a more satisfying scary movie. But for Spooky Season devotees looking for some throwback cinema, The Cycle fits the bill.
