So a bunch of Vikings raided the Normandy coast, and while they were there, they found some monks guarding a locked room. A locked room with an extremely vicious CGI wolf pup inside. That was actually a hellhound, who the Vikings decided to bring home with them. As one does. It killed them all and escaped into Norway, and either it or its descendants have roamed Scandinavia ever since. Either way, the wolf attacks some teenagers at a party, including Thale, the daughter of a new deputy police officer in town.
Most of that is out of the way in the first 10-15 minutes. The rest of the movie is split between the cop trying to find what killed one of the other girls in front of Thale, and Thale dealing with the aftermath of that attack.
The former actually resembles Jaws in some ways. Liv's a cop, new to the area, out of her depth. There's a grizzled, one-armed old guy who shows up, saying this was a werewolf and he knows how to kill it. There's a young, glasses-wearing veterinarian, who believes in science. He recognizes things like the claw left behind from the attack is unusually large for a wolf, and the bullet Liv used that actually killed the wolf was silver, and the wolf's flesh reacted very oddly to it.
Did I hope for a point where the vet would do a comparison of the bite radius of two victims and conclude there was another wolf? You bet. Did the movie provide it? Yes, it did. Two thumbs up!
The other plotline plays on how Thale had this traumatic experience, and she's in a new town, with few friends. Her father recently passed, she's distant towards her stepdad (who tries to connect, but she's not having it) and she's holding a lot of anger towards her mother around her dad's death. When Thale spends a lot of time alone in bed, or staring out the window at the moon, well, there's no reason to think it's anything other than PTSD or depression. Not that those are minor issues, but they do somewhat pale to her gradually becoming a werewolf.
Thale and her mother don't speak much, and most of their conversations are hostile and end poorly. So whatever Liv learns from the one-armed guy isn't passed along. Thale doesn't know why her hearing seems so sharp sometimes, but it happens when she's hallucinating the girl who died, so it's easy for her to dismiss it as she's just going crazy.
The movie's very good about setting up various things early, even little things, and making them pay off. The stepdad is a repairman/electrician. He knows about tools, but is also the absent-minded sort who keeps locking his keys in his car. Those things come up near the end. Thale and her little sister (who is deaf) are close, and that pays off, as Thale isn't so far gone she doesn't recognize her family. Liv is injured fighting the first wolf, that pays off at the end, too.
It's a well-plotted out movie, and it uses the distance between Thale and her mother effectively to help drive the two plotlines together at the climax.
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