Werewolf

Her characters are a little too blank to sustain interest through an entire film, but this modest indie generates a haunting mood of 21st-century despair.

The performers don't seem like they're acting at all, which contributes to the film's unsettling power.

Werewolf unmistakably announces McKenzie as a potentially significant new voice, gifted enough to make well-trod ground seem newly landscaped.

Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie's use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.

Working with the cinematographer Scott Moore, McKenzie frames her characters with a radical obliqueness, visually conveying their wounded tenderness and stifled fury and evoking mortal struggles with minuscule gestures.

In plumbing the pitch black, Werewolf offers the distinct hope of a brighter future - at least, a brighter future for Canadian cinema.

Scene by scene, what McKenzie is after is capturing the process of a young woman walling herself off from sentimental appeal in order to save her own life, steeling herself for the long walk away from the wreck of her man.

Werewolf is a wowser.

The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.

The finely gradated interactions between the protagonists and different representatives of various institutional establishments place empathy and ambivalence side by side.

Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf is one of the strongest Canadian films you'll see this year.

McKenzie doesn't stoop to deliver a pat happy ending, and even the moderately upbeat final scene features an oddly discordant note in the score that suggests not all is well.