Jordan Downey’s The Cycle which I caught at the 35th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival and hits Shudder tomorrow is a film where the themes ultimately become the driving force of this engrossingly ambitious midnighter that’s chock full of surprises. The film follows Meg Garland (Deborah Ann Woll) a renowned forensic anthropologist who is called from her body farm where she studies human decomposition to give some insight on a grisly crime scene. When she arrives she finds two women torn to shreds, the bodies appear to be from a recent animal attack. But she’s there to advise on an odd twist to the mystery, a corpse found about 100 yards from the double murder, untouched and who appears to have been dead for sometime before the attack.
That corpse just also happens to be that of Meg’s father who has been missing for about 36 years.
The Cycle’s title first and foremost is a direct call to the cycles of familial trauma, among others. There’s several examples of this throughout the film, not just how Meg’s father had abandoned her and mother taking with him their life savings. Meg’s assistant is expecting and the cop who comes to request Meg’s help is a third generation police officer, whose father was not thrilled about his son taking on the badge. There’s a few cycles as well embedded in this rather dense and engrossing slice is sub-genre.
I’m trying to keep this spoiler-free because part of the fun is watching the mystery unravel for yourself, but the second half gets downright wild. There are some seriously grotesque practical effects on display, and fans of old-school horror should find plenty to appreciate. Some of the film’s nastier moments are all the more effective for being realized practically rather than rendered via CGI. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you wince while simultaneously wanting a closer look at just how they pulled it off some of these mind bending gore gags.
Shouldering the narrative is Deborah Ann Woll, whom I’ve been following since her days on True Blood, who is simply terrific here. She gives Meg a real sense of emotional weight, which becomes increasingly important as the story gets more out there. But beneath all the gruesome discoveries and increasingly bizarre developments, Meg is still dealing with something painfully relatable: the possibility that the past she thought she’d left behind might not be behind her at all. Woll keeps that emotional thread intact even when the movie threatens to go completely off the rails, never letting us forget the real odds at stake here.
Smartly, Shudder seems to be keeping the film’s bigger surprises under wraps, and I’d recommend going in knowing as little as possible. With The Cycle Downey has delivered a mind melter that manages to be both genuinely nasty and emotionally affecting, which is a combination I’m always happy to see. The film has the gore, the surprises, and the kind of premise that makes you want to know what the hell is going on. But it also has something real to say about the cycles of generational trauma, and whether we let that define us or can we break the cycle.
Expect The Cycle to become a future cult classic.
